Download - JAMES WATT.pdf
JAMES WATT
CHAPTER ONE
The Evolution of the Engineer
" Since the late Rebellion, England hath abounded in
variety of Drinks (as it did lately in variety of
Religions) above any Nation in Europe.
EDWARD CHAMBERLAYNE.. 1669.
" Before or about the year 1760 a new era in all the
arts and sciences, learned and polite, commenced in
this country."
THE Society or CIVIL ENGINEERS.
The seventeenth century had been one of the
liveliest in English history. The Englishman of those
days, who was busy laying the foundations of the
modern state, was a very different figure from his
successor of two hundred years later who built the
superstructure and lived in it in peace and security.
He still lacked that sobriety and stability of character
for which he became famous in the days of Victoria,
and those familiar types which later generations
learned to regard as the props and pillars of the
social order had not yet been evolved. No stern
incorruptibles were going out to publish abroad the
blessings of British civilization and of the
unshakable British constitution, for the constitution
was being shaken like dice in a box and the social
system was in the melting-pot. The country squire,
hatched by the nouveau riche speculative landlord
out of the feudal princeling, was as yet barely
fledged, and was still trying his wings. The parson,
far from being a tower of strength in the village,
went anxiously about his work in constant terror lest
the hunter of to-day might be the quarry of to-
morrow in the giddy chase of the righteous after the
heretic and blasphemer. The future " nation of
shopkeepers " hardly knew what a shopkeeper was,
and the British workman had not been invented.
The seventeenth century therefore was a lively one,
and it was full of variety, not only in drinks and
religions, but also in political theories, constitutions,
sciences, inventions, patents, poetries and every kind
of ingenuity. The mind of the race was active,
flexible and resilient. It is true that when an
Englishman caught Puritanism he caught it badly,
but, though gloomy and unbeautiful, the Puritan
period was rich in constructive ideas, and once the
malady had run its course the nation bounded from
her bed in the robustest of health, without any
laborious interval of convalescence. There will
always be gloomy people as well as gay people, and
people with no ideas but their fathers' as well as
people with new and revolutionary ideas of their
own. But it is one of the blessings of providence that
the revolutionaries are generally gloomy while the
conservatives are often gay. Consequently,
whichever is in power, there will be life and
movement of one kind or the other.
In the period that lies between the date of the first
quotation at the head of this chapter and the date
referred to in the second, the stature of life dwindled
and its glamour faded. There was a reaction from the
violent experiments of the seventeenth century to a
more stable and less eventful kind of existence,
while the intellectual vivacity characteristic of
Elizabethan and Restoration society, becoming more
formal, more artificial, was frozen into a crystalline
brilliance, leaving to the highspirited no resource but
the elaborate cult of physical pleasures. It was an age
of fast living and slow thinking. There were
individuals who pressed on into new worlds, but
they travelled alone. The mind and the tastes of the
people were as a clock that has stopped. The hands
still pointed at I690. England became less famous
for the variety of her drinks than for the quantity
consumed, and for the violence of its effects. The
habit of gin-drinking so utterly demoralised the
inhabitants of the metropolis that the City of
London sent up a petition imploring Parliament to
take severe measures to suppress the evil. Society
found a congenial form of excitement in the passion
for gambling, which culminated in the glorious
fatuity of the South Sea Bubble and the fraudulent
companies of I720. The coarseness of our manners
and the cruelty of our sports were widely denounced
by critics both English and foreign, and it is hardly
surprising to learn that it was in this generation that
journalism for the first time came into its own.
When vitality returned it brought a revival of all
those activities which had been characteristic of the
seventeenth century. Once more a fertility of
invention, both mechanical and artistic, enlivened
the industries of the country. The glass-ware of
England won so high a reputation in Europe that
French craftsmen paid it the flattery of imitation, the
English potters enjoyed an unquestioned pre-
eminence in their art, and the ingenuity of the
makers of scientific instruments was the admiration
of all visitors. "Inventing" became the fashionable
hobby of learned circles. Once more the nation was
stirred and tormented by an access of religious
fervour, and the Puritanism of the seventeenth
century found a parallel in the Methodism of the
eighteenth. John Wesley, who was at the height of
his power in I760~~ is said to have preached 800
sermons a year to audiences that often exceeded
I0000 in number. Like the Puritans before him, he
called on his hearers to renounce the thoughtless life
of vicious pleasure and make religion an inspiration
instead of, at best, a popular social function. It may
be that his teaching was narrow and intolerant, and
led as often to religious fanaticism as to religious
conviction, but it undoubtedly helped to shake the
middle classes of England out of their apathy. And
once they were roused they could not fail to see that
they held the future of their country in their hands.
Once more the accepted principles of government
and the traditional doctrines of political philosophy
were questioned and challenged by active minds
intent on change. Parliamentary reform was already
in the air when Tom Paine, inspired by the example
of France, denounced the whole structure of the
constitution and preached the virtues of
republicanism in a book whose already enormous
circulation was increased by the Government's
attempts to suppress it. William Blake walked the
streets of London wearing the red cap of Liberty,
but as he was the greatest genius of the age, he was
naturally regarded by most of his contemporaries as
a harmless lunatic. Later came Robert Owen,
teaching a theory of socialism and co-operation so
much in advance of the understanding of his time,
that it had to be unearthed a century later from the
litter of Marxian dogmas and researches under
which it had been buried. A writer, looking back
from the calm heights of the Victorian era, described
the reign of George III as an " age of excitement, of
which those who are now in the meridian of their
days can, from the repose which they have enjoyed,
form but a feeble idea."
It was in this " age of excitement " that James Watt
lived and worked. His genius was one of the
manifestations of the age's vigour and drew
nourishment from its extraordinary fertility. Watt
was a member of that band of builders who were
constructing the framework of our material
civilisation, setting the stage, as it were, for the
drama of modern life. In all these manifestations of
the movement of progress, the activity of the closing
years of the eighteenth century appears as the revival
of a spirit that had first shown itself a hundred or
more years earlier. The seed had then been sown,
and the first small crop reaped; there followed a spell
of inclement weather, and the plant withered. But it
did not die. The germ of life had been preserved in
the soil, and in due course it put forth a new crop
richer and stronger than the first. Other crops have
followed, and to-day we are still reaping the fruits of
that first sowing. The movement which was born in
the seventeenth century and grew to maturity in the
days of Watt has created the modern world.
Boswell relates how he once visited the works at
Soho where Boulton and Watt were manufacturing
their steam-engines. " I shall never forget," he writes,
" Mr. Boulton's expression to me when surveying
the works. ' I sell here, sir, what all the world desires
to have, Power."' But the power which Watt
invented and Boulton sold was not that which most
men lust for, the power to dominate their fellows; it
was the power to win the mastery over Nature, to
compel her to serve the ends of man, to extract
from her treasure-house whatever may add to his
comfort. It is to man's success in this struggle with
Nature that we owe our houses and our cities, our
roads and our railways, our food, our clothes and all
the luxuries and conveniences which we are pleased
to call the evidences of civilisation.
No one would suggest that this struggle began in the
seventeenth century. It is as old as history, and
might be traced back to the day when Adam and
Eve picked their figleaves. But it falls into well-
defined periods. The use of fire, the art of working
metals and of building with brick and stone, the
loom and the Lough, all these were discovered in
antiquity. During the Middle Ages the use of these
devices was elaborated, but little was added that was
absolutely new, and the only inventions that had a
palpable eject on the progress of civilisation were
those of the mariner's compass, gunpowder and the
printing press. The craftsmen, working generation
after generation along the same traditional lines,
developed a degree of skill that has never been
surpassed, but by I600 there was little room for
further advance without some more fundamental
change of method. And the change took place; for at
that moment there came into play two new forces,
which effected so complete a transformation that
the material civilisation of the modern world, when
compared with the medieval, seems to be a new
creation.
Those two forces were Science and Finance. If
Nature was to be compelled to render new services
she must first be persuaded to yield up her secrets.
Before he could advance any further, man had to
study the anatomy of the physical world, and as he
progressed in that study, which is Science, so
civilisation grew under his hands. Every feature that
makes the visible shell of our modern life unlike that
of the Middle Ages, from the engines in our
factories to the flowers in our gardens, is the
product of the invention of Science, translated into
matter at the bidding of Finance. Although Art and
Literature have changed from an impulse not
scientific, yet they would play much the same part in
our lives to-day as they did in those of our ancestors,
had not Science furnished means for the infinite
multiplication of the original work of the artist.
These twin powers invaded also the world of
thought. Everything is good, cries Finance, which
yields a profit. Nothing may be believed, says
Science, until it has been proved. Between them they
had nothing but contempt for the Middle Ages,
when men took their beliefs on trust, and were
ignorant of the first principles of sanitation. It is in
the seventeenth century that we shall find the gulf
between old and new, and the earliest signs that
these two parents of modernity have begun their
work. The first great age of science in England is
marked by the foundation of the Royal Society of
London in I662 and its early years were made
famous by the researches of Isaac Newton. Finance
can be represented by two types, the banker and the
dealer in stocks and shares. The history of modern
banking begins with the foundation of the Bank of
England in I694 and of the Bank of Scotland in the
following year. The greatest joint-stock enterprise
ever launched, the East India Company, received its
charter in I600~~ and the first independent Stock
Exchange was set up in 'Change Alley in I698.
There had been men of science in the ancient world
and in the Middle Ages. Roger Bacon, who died in I
292~~ touched the very essence of the scientific
outlook when he wrote, " There are two methods in
which we acquire knowledge, argument and
experiment." But he stood alone. Some three
hundred years later appeared the distinguished
pioneers of the coming age, contemporaries of
Galileo Galilei.
Gradually the Universities introduced scientific
subjects into their curricula, encouraged by the
foundation of Professorships in Natural Phil
osophy, Mathematics, Botany and so forth. Just
before the Civil War the point had been reached at
which scattered students began to regard themselves
as colleagues, a conscious spirit of co-operatlon
appeared, and isolated minds were welded into that
most elusive of intellectual phenomena, a
"movement." That this movement received its
embodiment in the Royal Society at the hands of
Charles II shows that influential circles, outside the
group of the scientists themselves, had recognised
the great value of the work and the eminence of the
workers. A Court that wished to rival in brilliance
that of Louis XIV must be a patron of the Sciences
as well as of the Arts.
The early members were a compact band of
enthusiasts. Though the field of study was wide, the
available knowledge in each branch was, as yet,
small, and a vigorous mind could keep in touch with
all that was being done in the world of science. They
would meet together of an evening to witness an
experiment carried out by one of their number, not
to demonstrate some new theory that he claimed to
have proved, but in the hope that the observations
of the assembled company might lead some one to
throw out an idea of value for discussion and
investigation.
Where all was new, progress was rapid; they were
tilling virgin soil and won rich returns for their
labour. The excitement was intense, for any day
news might come of some discovery that shattered
the tradition of centuries. At the same time a great
part, probably the main part, of their attention was
devoted to practical problems. Chemistry and
botany were studied in their relation to medicine,
astronomy and meteorology as aids to the science of
navigation, and a lively interest was taken in the
technical problems of industry and agriculture. This
connection between theory and the application of
theory, this cooperation between the men of science
and the men of business, between the professional
and the amateur, was destined to grow closer as time
went on, and bore precious fruit in the eighteenth
century.
Even the healthy young plant of English science
languished in the sunless days of the first two
Georges. When the revival came, the centre of life
was found to have shifted to the more bracing
climate north of the Tweed. The Universities of
Edinburgh and Glasgow were made famous by a
group of scientists who were working and teaching
in them during the last forty years of the eighteenth
century. More will have to be said of these men later,
for it was among them that Watt spent the most
crucial years of his early life. They and their
successors revolutionised the science of chemistry as
completely as Newton had revolutionised that of
physics. The story of their discoveries ran quickly
throughout Europe, and every learned Society was
agog with eagerness to hear the latest results of their
inquiries. Every step in advance made scientific work
more complex and the need for specialization
greater. The average man was no longer able to
spread himself over the whole field of knowledge.
The pure philosopher, who devoted himself to the
pursuit of principles, was inclined to leave to some
one else the application of those principles to useful
ends. This division of labour resulted in a closer and
more effective co-operation between science and
business, for new Societies were formed, less purely
scientific and more definitely industrial in character,
which acted as a connecting link. They were the field
of action of a type of man who believed that the true
road to economic progress lay in the application of
the exact methods of scientific experiment to the
problems of industrial technique. By his patronage
and his example he tried to turn the captain of
industry into a scientist and the craftsman into an
engineer. The first and most famous of these bodies
was the Royal Society of Arts, founded in 1754. Its
objects are made sufficiently plain in its full official
title, " The Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce." Its founders were
scientists, most of them Fellows of the Royal
Society, and it began its work by offering prizes for
discoveries and inventions which might prove
valuable to the economic life of the country. It had
been preceded by a similar association in Dublin and
was immediately followed by one in Edinburgh. The
members of these Societies were interested not only
in industry, but also in agriculture, and on this side
the movement was definitely international, having
branches in France, Switzerland and Denmark.
According to a contemporary writer the scientific
spirit had spread even to the Far East, and " the
Emperor of China rewards the husbandman who
makes the best and greatest improvements in his
land with the dignity of a Mandarin of the eighth
class."
Simultaneously there were stirrings at the other end
of the scale. The craftsmen were advancing along
the path of science to meet these scientists who were
invading the field of industry. Apart from the
blacksmith, there were only two mechanical crafts of
any importance in the seventeenth century, those of
the clockmaker and the wheelwright. The art of
clockmaking was taken up with enthusiasm in
England after the Restoration, and by I750 ;4 we
beat all Europe in Clocks and Watches of all sorts."
The work demanded the most perfect accuracy, and,
more significant still, machines were invented by the
clockmakers for cutting out the metal parts used in
the manufacture. This is probably the first example
of machinery being used to make machinery.
The trade through which this particular type of skill
was turned to scientific use was that of mathematical
instrument maker. He made the instruments used
for navigation and surveying. Naturally he was
employed by the best scientists of the day to make
the apparatus for their experiments. The latest
designs, the newest mechanical devices, all passed
through his hands, and from the study of these he
learned so much of the methods of science that he
often became a valued partner in the work of
invention. It was in this way that Watt received his
early training. A striking example is found in the
career of Laurence Earnshaw of Stockport. He got
his mechanical education as apprentice to a
clockmaker, but his ambitious nature carried him
beyond the confines of this narrow trade. He was " a
blacksmith, whitesmith, coppersmith, gunsmith,
bellfounder and coffin-maker; made and erected
sundials; mended fiddles; repaired, tuned and played
upon and taught the harpsichord and virginal But
this was all craftsman's work; he went further. " He
carried so far his theory and practice of clockwork,
as to be the inventor of a very curious astronomical
and geographical machine, containing a celestial and
terrestrial globe, to which different movements were
given, representing the diurnal and annual motions
of the earth, the position of the moon and stars, the
sun's place in the ecliptic, etc., all with the greatest
correctness." Finally, we are told, he invented " a
machine to spin and reel cotton at one operation,"
and " a simple and ingenious piece of mechanism for
raising water from a coal-mine," thus putting his
talents at the service of industry and becoming in the
fullest sense an " engineer." The variety of the list
might make us incredulous if it were not that we can
find an almost exact parallel in the achievements of
James Watt himself.
The wheelwright's business consisted in making and
repairing all the machinery in mills that were driven
by the power of water or of wind. He was generally a
man of little ingenuity, who worked by rule of
thumb and did exactly what he had been taught to
do by his father. But if he had intelligence and
curiosity it was always possible for him to discover
the mechanical principles on which his machines
were based, to master the theory as well as the
practice, and so to become, not merely a craftsman,
but an engineer, able to create as well as to copy.
The story is told of James Brindley, the engineer of
the first canal built in England, that when he was
apprentice to a wheelwright and was working with
his master on a paper-mill at Macclesfield, he
suddenly disappeared one Saturday afternoon and
was missing for two nights. On Monday morning he
was back at work. Being convinced that his master's
conservative treatment would never put the mill to
rights, he had set out for Manchester to visit the
Smedley Mill, twentyfive miles away. He spent
Sunday examining the machinery, and having got the
details well fixed in his mind, walked back to
Macclesfield next morning. His master was so
impressed by his story that he handed over to him
the control of the work, and Brindley, after changing
all the designs, produced a machine that included all
the best features of the Smedley Mill and several
new devices of his own invention.
The craftsman, in fact, was being educated. In one
way or another he was picking up fragments from
the store of knowledge that was being accumulated
by the scientists, absorbing, almost unconsciously,
the scientific atmosphere that emanated from the
centres of research. An unusually observant writer
noticed what was happening as early as I747. He
produced a book in which he gave a description of
every trade, craft or profession practised in London.
When he came to the engineer, he wrote: " By
Engineer I do not mean the Military Engineer, but
that Tradesman who is employed in making Engines
for raising of Water, etc. We have improved much
of late years in this useful Art, and have now
Engines moved both by Fire and Water, which our
Forefathers knew nothing of. This has been owing
to the labour of the Royal Society, and the progress
we have made in Experimental Philosophy." The
author goes on to explain that the engineer must
know the laws of mechanics, and adds, " He requires
a large Stock to set up with, and a considerable
Acquaintance among the Gentry. The business is at
present in few hands." It was, in fact, a new
profession, offspring of the union of science with
craftsmanship in which the members of the Royal
Society of Arts, and others like them, played the part
of Pandarus.
Two parents are generally considered to be enough
for any child, and, in the metaphors of the historian,
one is often made to suffice. The engineer had three.
The author just quoted referred to " Military
Engineers " as a familiar institution. The history of
the Engineers as a branch of the Army goes back
into the Middle Ages when they were concerned
with fortification, mining, the building of roads and
bridges and the whole province of artillery. When
the Artillery was split off and established as a
separate service in I7I6 it became evident that every
branch of military engineering had its counterpart in
civil life. Even in the seventeenth century engineers
had been employed to drain the Fens and to
construct the " New River " which gave London its
water-supply, but such men were scarce and did not
yet constitute a " trade." Only when the needs of
commerce called for the building of canals, bridges,
roads, docks, harbours and lighthouses, did the Civil
Engineers begin to be conscious of themselves as a
professional group. They also realised that their
trade was a highly scientific one and that most of its
technique had still to be invented. They felt keenly
the community of interest that linked them with the
engineers of a rather different type, who were
inventing and manufacturing scientific instruments
for use in surveying and engines for raising water or
driving it through canals. In order that they might
meet together to discuss the peculiar problems of
their trade and share the advantages of their
individual experiences they founded the Society of
Civil Engineers in I77I. The first list of members
reveals clearly the triple origin of the profession.
Joseph Priestley represented pure science. James
Watt stood for the craftsman whom science
converts into a mechanical engineer and inventor of
machines. Smeaton, the builder of the Forth and
Clyde Canal and the Eddystone Lighthouse, and
Rennie, who began as a millwright and afterwards
constructed Waterloo Bridge and the East India
Docks, won fame by the execution of great public
works, the technique for which, so far as it existed,
was inherited largely from the military engineers.
The Society united within itself every branch of the
trade as known in those days, and it was at once
accepted as a learned Society of high standing. Its
members shared the respect that was already being
paid to eminent scientists; they also won a "
considerable Acquaintance among the Gentry," and
so gained access, not only to their drawingrooms,
but, which was far more important, to their pockets.
The process of evolution was complete. The Age of
Engineering had begun.
CHAPTER TWO
Childhood and Education
"Because of a certain singing teakettle we now have
the puffing engine. Young Isaac Watts heard the
song. He figured that what made it sing would make
something go, if only it could be hitched up right."
Advt. in American Magazine (quoted in Punch, July
30th, 1924)
ON the southern bank of the River Clyde,not far
from the point where it turns south into the Firth
and about twenty-five miles west of Glasgow, lies
the port of Greenock. In the far back days when
men laid down their lives for the Covenant, the
eastern part of the present town was a separate
village known by the name of Cartsdyke, or
Crawfordsdyke. It was a prosperous little fishing
port and considered itself superior to its neighbour,
for Cartsdyke had a pier and Greenock had none.
Here, somewhere in the middle of the century,
settled Thomas Watt, the grandfather of the
engineer. He came, an orphan and a fugitive, from
Aberdeen, where his father had been killed, it is
thought, defending his home against the invading
forces of Montrose. He was by profession a teacher
of mathematics. It seems odd that in so small a town
it should have been possible for any one to confine
himself to such a trade and live. It is clear that
Thomas Watt not only lived, but throve, on his
earnings, for he bought house property in the
district and filled offices of trust in the town for
which, even in seventeenth century Scotland,
substance was probably as important a qualification
as virtue. A great part of his work, and one that must
have demanded almost superhuman patience,
consisted in teaching the elements of astronomy and
navigation to the local seamen. When he died in
I734 at the ripe age of ninety-two, thus setting an
example of longevity that was followed by his
descendants, it was as " Professor of the
Mathematicks " that he was commemorated on his
tombstone.
Thomas Watt had two sons, John and James. John
was educated as a mathematician and went off to
Glasgow to be a surveyor. One example of his work
survives. It is a survey of the Clyde which he made
in I734~ and which was afterwards revised by his
nephew James, the engineer, and published in I760.
This map shows that Greenock had by then
definitely gone ahead of Cartsdyke, for while the
latter was merely a jetty, the former had now
completed the excellent little harbour which had
been begun some thirty years before. It is quite likely
that John's reputation as a surveyor helped his
nephew to get work of the same kind when he was a
young man with his name still to make.
John's brother James, seeing the drift of business,
wisely moved to Greenock and set up as a builder,
contractor and general merchant. He was prepared
to do pretty well anything that came his way. He
stocked and sold every variety of store that a ship
could want; he manufactured every species of naval
gear; he would put in repair any of the instruments
used in navigation. When his father died and left
him part of his fortune, he bought a house and some
land backing on the harbour and there installed his
workshop. The trade of the Clyde was growing fast.
Tobacco ships from Virginia called at Greenock
harbour, and the sugar of the West Indies went up
the river to the refineries at Glasgow. James Watt
the elder prospered in his business, grew bolder in
his mercantile speculations and took shares in ships
engaged in trade to distant parts. As he prospered,
so he rose in the estimation of his fellow-citizens
and, like his father before him, he was elected to
hold public office as Town Councillor, Treasurer,
and finally " Bailie," or chief magistrate. He had a
wide circle of highly respectable acquaintances,
including the family of Mr. Shaw, the local minister.
Mr. Shaw had a daughter, Margaret, who was one of
the earliest and most constant friends of James Watt
the younger. Like so many who figure in this history,
she lived to be very old, but exactly how old it is
impossible to say, for " Miss Margaret, with
maidenly coyness, managed to her last hour to keep
her age a profound secret." However, shortly before
her death it was commonly whispered that the dear
lady would never see ninety again. James was also
very well connected through his wife. He had
married Agnes Muirhead, " a fine-looking woman,
with pleasing, graceful manners, a cultivated mind,
an excellent understanding, and an equal, cheerful
temper." Her family well remembered settling in
Clydesdale somewhere in the latter years of the
eleventh century, and had " never acknowledged any
superior." But the most glorious episode in its
history occurred when the Laird of Muirhead came
to the defence of his King at the battle of Flodden
Field, andÑ
" Twa hundred mair, of his ain name, Frae Torwood
and the Clyde, Sware they wad never gang to hame,
But a' die by his side."
But the existence of the virtuous Agnes two hundred
years later must be taken as evidence that the clan
was not entirely wiped out on that fatal day.
James and Agnes had five children. The three eldest
died in infancy, the youngest was drowned on a
voyage to America at the age of twenty-four. The
fourth son, James, the subject of this memoir, was
born on the 19th of January 1736. He was from the
first a sickly boy, and showed signs even then of the
chronic illhealth that was going to torment him
through the greater part of his life. His mother was
devoted to him, and, rather than send him to a
school where he might not be properly looked after,
she kept him for a time under her own care at home
and gave him his first lessons herself. It was
probably fortunate for him that this was so. Had he
gone very early to school his sensitive nature might
have been bruised, and his tastes forced into the
narrow channel of things accepted by schoolboy
public opinion. As it was, by the time he was let out
of the family circle into a wider world, his
individuality and originality were already well
developed, and he never showed any tendency to
adapt himself to the type that was most admired by
his schoolfellows. He went his own way and took
the consequences. And they must have been severe.
This poor, weakly child, fresh from his mother's
knee, with his comic air of thoughtful gravity, was a
gift from heaven to the other boys. He was ob
viously made to be ragged. If he had beaten them all
at their work they might have respected him and
forgiven him for being a " mother's darling." But he
did not. He was slow and awkward, and fell below
the ordinary standard demanded by the common
routine of school lessons. But, when he had got used
to his new surroundings and found work that was
congenial to him, his genius peeped through the veil
of his childishness. " He was thought rather dull at
his lessons. His abilities began to appear when he
wasÑ about thirteen or fourteen years oldÑput into
a mathematical class, where he made rapid
progress." This seems to be the most reliable of the
pictures handed down to us of Watt's schooldays.
Of course there are sensational stories of Watt's
infantile precocity. This is an attention that no
genius can escape. The chief source in this case is
Watt's cousin, Mrs. Marion Campbell, who dictated
her reminiscences in I798~~ some fifty years after
the events with which we are concerned. On the
whole the document seems to be a faithful one, but
memory plays strange tricks. The first story runs as
follows. When young James was six years old a
visitor noticed him scribbling on the hearth with a
piece of chalk. " Mr. Watt," said he, " you ought to
send that boy to a public school, and not allow him
to trifle away his time at home." " Look how my
child is occupied before you condemn him," replied
the father. The boy was, in fact, drawing geometrical
figures and marking down the results of his
calculations. The visitor questioned him and found
his answers quick and intelligent. " Forgive me," he
said, this boy's education has not been neglected: he
is no common child." Of the two biographers who
give most attention to Watt's childhood, one accepts
this story, the other rejects it. What are we to say ?
Where evidence is lacking, it is wisest to play for
safety. It is certain that Watt was an ingenious child
with a natural taste for mathematics, and if we add a
year or two to the age quoted, make allowances for a
father's pride and a visitor's politeness, and suppose
that the boy had already begun his lessons with his
mother, we can pass the story without an excessive
strain on the historical conscience.
Then comes the inevitable kettle that haunts all
youthful engineers. " James Watt," said his stern
aunt, Mrs. Muirhead, one evening, " I never saw
such an idle boy; for the last hour you have not
spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle
and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a
silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises
from the spout, and catching and connecting the
drops it falls into. Are you not ashamed of spending
your time in this way! "Now this tale is very
attractive; but it is also very suspicious. Apart from
the improbability of any stern aunt upbraiding her
nephew for finding something to keep him quiet in
the drawing-room after tea, the words she claims to
have used are unnaturally appropriate. She noticed,
apparently, that young Watt was experimenting on
the condensation of steam, and we know, as Mrs.
Muirhead did not, that his great invention was to be
related, not to the force of steamÑits most obvious
propertyÑbut precisely to this fact of condensation.
If it is mere coincidence that this particular event
should have been recorded in a form so tellingÑ and
recorded, be it remembered, through the remark of a
woman who could not have understood its
significanceÑHeaven must indeed be on the side of
the historians. Suppose she had merely said, as she
well might, " James, you idle boy, leave that kettle
alone at once ! " How tantalising that would have
been for all future biographers!
But the truth or falsehood of this story is a trivial
matter. Even if it were true it could have no real
importance, and to attribute some deep significance
to it, to imagine that the kettle might have inspired
Watt's great invention, is a serious blunder. In the
first place Watt's . . . . . inquiries Into the nature of
steam, which led to his work on the engine, did not
begin until at least ten years after the date given to
this incident. We have a full narrative of those
inquiries when they did begin, and the parentage of
his great idea is satisfactorily accounted for without
the aid of the kettle. In the second place the main
principles governing the use of steam for power
were already well known, and were not awaiting
discovery by the genius of a child still in the nursery.
Steam-engines of a kind had long been a familiar
feature of the industrial world. Watt's improvements
were based on accurate measurement and ingenuity
in mechanical detail, and no kettle could help him
there. Inventions are not the children of chance.
They are more often the result of hard work and
clear thinking than of a dazzling inspiration.
Watt lived at home till he was eighteen, occasionally
paying visits to his mother's relations in Glasgow.
The atmosphere was favourable to the development
of his scientific instincts. In his father's workshop he
could find a complete outfit of carpenter's tools, and
could watch the manufacture of the mechanical
parts of ship's tackle or examine and play with the
collection of nautical instruments. He amused
himself by copying what he saw, and became highly
skilled at making models. By good fortune examples
of his work were found and described by a workman
who was apprenticed in his father's shop. They
included models of pulleys, pumps, capstans, a
barrel-organ and a crane, probably copied from the
first crane ever seen in Greenock, which had been
made by his father to unload the Virginia tobacco
ships. Watt seemed to be attracted by every science
in turn. Geometry and mechanics were his first
loves, but he passed on to geology, botany and
astronomy. At one time anatomy fascinated him,
and he was caught coming home carrying under his
coat the head of a child that had died of some
unusual disease. He wanted to dissect it. Often he
would go down on to the quay that jutted out into
the harbour at the foot of the garden to fish; often
he would wander off in the evening to a great clump
of elms and beeches south of the town, and there he
lay on his back with a telescope borrowed from his
father's store and watched the slow procession of
the stars through the network of branches above
him. Whenever his health was bad or his headaches
worse than usual, and he knew that he was getting
sullen and ill-tempered, he slunk away into the
solitude of the moors and walked for hours by
himself until the breath of the hillside had purged his
bitter mood. He was a nervous boy and full of
fancies. He read voraciously whatever came his way,
and stocked his mind with vivid images that came
pouring out when he talked. A friend of his mother,
with whom he was staying when a boy of about
fourteen, said to her, " You must take your boy,
James, home; I cannot stand the state of excitement
he keeps me in; I am worn out with want of sleep.
Every evening before ten o'clock, our usual hour of
retiring to rest, he contrives to engage me in
conversation, then begins some striking tale, and,
whether humorous or pathetic, the interest is so
overpowering, that all the family listen to him with
breathless attention; hour after hour strikes
unheeded. In vain his brother John scolds and pulls
him by the arm; ' Come to bed, James. You are
inventing story after story to keep us with you till
after midnight, because you love company, and your
severe fits of toothache prevent your sleeping at an
earlier hour."' It is an excellent picture of the boy,
highlystrung and imaginative, with a mind so
restlessly active that he himself feared it and sought
refuge from it in company.
When he had finished his schooling Watt worked
for a time about his father's shop. In I753 his
mother died. He was then seventeen. It was
probably his mother's devotion to him that had kept
him so long at home when other boys of his age
were away earning their living. Her death broke up
the family life at Greenock. In June of the following
year he was sent to Glasgow to learn the craft of a
mathematical instrument maker. It was a natural
choice. It was a profession closely allied to those of
his father and his grandfather, and it gave more
scope to his mechanical dexterity than he would
have got by following either of their trades Its
prospects, too, were good. It was described at this
date as " a very ingenious and profitable Business,"
and was by no means overstocked with labour. But
when he got to Glasgow he found there was no one
who could teach him. He spent a year there, working
under a nondescript mechanic who called himself an
" optician," until he attracted the attention of Dr.
Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the
University. Dick realised that here was first-class
talent running to waste, and strongly advised him to
go to London and get the best training that was to
be had. Watt asked his father's permission to go, and
it was given. It was a momentous decision. This
must have been the first time in its history that any
member of the Watt family had proposed to cross
the border, and London seems a long way from
Glasgow if you have to get there on horseback.
There was also the expense to be considered.
Apparently Watt's father had either overreached
himself in his speculations or had suffered losses at
sea; for, although he had once been quite wellto-do,
he was now obliged to leave his son to make his
own way in the world, giving him only the most
meagre of allowances while he was getting his
training. In spite of all difficulties the adventure was
accepted, and on 7th June, I755 Watt mounted his
horse to ride to London, with a letter of
introduction from Dr. Dick in his pocket.
CHAPTER THREE
James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker
" Item, it is ordained, that no Freeman of the said
Company using the said Trade, Art, or Mystery, do
keep in his service . . . any foreigners, alien or
English, not being free of the said Company of
Clockmakers, or bound as an apprentice
thereunto."-ordinances OF THE CLOCKMAKERS
COMPANY OF LONDON. 1632.
IT took Watt twelve days to reach London, and at
once his difficulties began. The city was still clinging
to its ancient customs and privileges, chief among
which was the right to keep all its trade in the hands
of the native- born townsmen, and to forbid any "
foreigner " from another town to settle down within
its walls to earn his living. The time was long past
when any town could preserve this monopoly intact,
or indeed wanted to, but the right remained in
theory, and could be used discreetly to get rid of
undesirables. The vagrant, who seemed likely to
become a pauper, and the skilled craftsman, who
might prove a dangerous competitor for the custom
of the townspeople, were refused admission; the
wealthy merchant and the honest, unenterprising
labourer were unmolested.
The initiative in these matters came generally from
the Gilds and Companies which controlled the
various trades carried on in the City. They were
always afraid of competition, and anxious to keep
down the number of tradesmen among whom the
available custom had to be divided. The chief
principles which the Gilds had inherited from the
Middle Ages were the following. All regulations
affecting the trade were made by the Masters who
ruled the Gild. No person might set up in business
on his own unless he was a Master and had been
admitted as such into the Gild, and the normal way
of becoming a Master was by serving an
apprenticeship of seven years under a Gildsman, and
then paying the fees for admission to the rank and
privileges of Mastership. In this way the trade was
protected against an influx of inferior and
irresponsible labour which might lower the standard
of work, and, by competing for employment in the
restricted market of the town, drag down the level of
the earnings of the craftsman.
Now society in the reign of George II was anything
but medieval. Little was left of the elaborate system
of industry based on the Gild. At the top of the
industrial scale was a class of wealthy men,
merchants or employers of labour, who had no
patience with rules of this kind. They ran their
businesses as they thought best, advanced boldly
into any field that looked profitable, respecting
nobody's preserves, and had no intention of teaching
the secrets of their trade to any one except their own
sons. At the other end of the scale were the
labourers in common trades where the degree of
skill required was small. Such men were not likely to
go through a long period of apprenticeship when
they could learn their job well enough without it,
and nothing awaited them at the end of it but a fight
for existence in an overstocked labour market in
which they had no special advantage. But between
these two classes came the highly skilled handicrafts,
and there conditions were often different. As a long
training was essential, apprenticeship had some
meaning, and when it was over the craftsman was
ready to start business on his own. The Masters in a
trade of this kind were in a commanding position.
They had no employers over them with power to
dictate terms; they had nothing to fear from the
competition of upstart unqualified workmen; and
they had a monopoly in training recruits to the craft.
Whenever there were enough of them in a town to
have an organisation of their own they made strict
rules for the training of novices and their admission
to the status of Master, and no one who had not
qualified according to these rules was permitted to
open shop within the town.
The Clockmakers of London were a trade of this
kind. The Company was not medieval in origin; it
had been founded in I63I. But it was by nature
suited to the medieval type of organisation. The
mathematical instrument makers were a branch of
the Company of Clockmakers and had the same
rules. Watt, apparently, had not thought of this
difficulty. His case was exactly that for which
apprenticeship rules were designed. He wanted to
get trained in order to become a Master and start
business on his own. His only proper course was to
bind himself by a legal contract as apprentice to a
member of the trade. But he was in no position to
conform to the ordinary regulations. In the first
place he was too old; in the second place he was a "
foreigner " and had no right to work in the City at
all; in the third place he could not possibly afford to
undertake to serve the full term of seven years. He
must find a Master who was prepared to break the
rules. The fact that he was a " foreigner " who had
no intention of setting up shop in London was a
point in his favour, for London was not afraid of
possible rivals in Glasgow. To teach such a man the
mysteries of the craft was a breach of the letter of
the law only, not of the spirit.
Even so it was nearly three weeks before Watt found
the man he was looking for. Then he discovered Mr.
John Morgan of Cornhill. Morgan was willing to
take him for a year and teach him all he wanted to
learn. During that time he was to give his labour
free, and as the engagement was quite irregular, he
had to pay the large fee of twenty guineas to
compensate his master for the violence he was doing
to conscience.
Watt settled down to do seven years' work in a year.
On five days in the week he put in ten hours a day.
But it was difficult to avoid wasting time. Each
workman in the shop was a specialist on some
particular instrument; Watt wanted to learn to make
them all, and so worked with each in turn. But if the
man he wanted happened to be busy or away for a
time, he got interrupted in his course of progress. In
six weeks he had outstripped a fellow-apprentice
who had been in the shop for two years; in nine
months he was as skilful as a fully trained and
experienced workman, and could cover a wider field.
All this time he hardly ever went out. When he got
off in the evening he was much too tired to think of
amusements, and anyhow he could not afford them.
But he had another reason for staying indoors.
England was enjoying a short interval of peace,
recovering from the strain of fighting with Austria
against Prussia, before she embarked on a new war
with Prussia against Austria. She had tasted the
sweets of Empire and was persuading herself that
God made the sea for the English. Some fifteen
years before, to the strains of the popular new song,
" Rule Britannia ! " the British fleet had sailed out to
defend our precious monopoly in the slave trade.
Now, while the people of London were still
proclaiming that " Britons never, never, never will be
slaves," the officers of the Press-gang were lurking
round the corner ready to pounce on any young
Englishman who had so touching a faith in the
freedom of his country as to walk about the streets
of the capital after dark. This was a serious danger to
Watt, for, as he was a stranger with no rights in the
City, he could not claim the protection of the civil
authorities. In the spring of I756 the Press became
very active. A fleet had to be manned in a hurry for
Admiral Byng to take out, to disgrace itself at
Minorca. A thousand men were taken in one night. "
They now press anybody they can get," wrote Watt
to his father, " landsmen as well as seamen, except it
be in the Liberties of the City, where they are
obliged to carry them before my Lord Mayor first;
and unless one be either a Prentice or a creditable
tradesman, there is scarce any getting off again. And
if I was carried before my Lord Mayor, I durst not
avow that I wrought in the City, it being against their
laws for any unfreeman to work, even as a
journeyman, within the Liberties." Fortunately he
escaped.
All this time Watt was working much too hard and
not getting enough to eat. He cut his expenditure on
food down to eight shillings a week, and could get it
no lower without " pinching his belly." The strain
was too much for his fragile constitution. When his
year was up his health gave way, and he suffered
from violent attacks of rheumatism. He longed to
get back to the fresh air of the Scotch countryside.
In August he screwed up his courage to face the
weary journey into the north, and, mounting his
horse, he turned his back on London. After a short
stay at Greenock that restored his spirits and his
health, he went on to Glasgow, with the outfit of
tools that he had bought in London, to offer his
newly-won skill to the world.
Glasgow at the beginning of the eighteenth century
was a small seaport lying on the north bank of the
Clyde only, with from ten to fifteen thousand
inhabitants. When Defoe visited it about I724 he
found it a " city of business," and the only town in
Scotland that was developing both its foreign and
domestic trade. Its growing prosperity was based on
the commerce with the colonies in the New World.
From the time that the first Glasgow ship crossed
the Atlantic in I7I67 an ever-increasing proportion
of the sugar of the West Indies and the tobacco of
Virginia found its way up the Clyde, to the great
indignation of the old-established English ports,
which accused the Glasgow merchants of defrauding
the Customs. Perhaps they did; but the charge could
not be proved, and Glasgow grew rapidly richer.
When the American Colonies revolted in I775 this
trade was annihilated, but by that time the prosperity
of the city was built on wider and firmer foundations
and it quickly recovered.
In the last quarter of the century the face of the
town was changed. An upstart race of vigorous,
pushing manufacturers began to lick the old place
into shape. The merchant, as he watched his ship sail
out of the harbour, knew that before she returned
with her cargo from the West some new hive of
industry would rear itself within sight of his
warehouse, and every hour that he waited patiently
for the wind to do his work, behind its walls men
and machines were ceaselessly toiling under the eye
of a master who was building with their labour the
edifice of his unchallengeable power. One by one
the signs of the new age appeared. First the stone
bridge across the Clyde founded in I 768; then the
Forth and Clyde Canal, linking Glasgow with the
Eastern seas; then, gauntly prominent among the
mellowed houses of the old town, new buildings in
the clean, square style of the period sprang up like
temples offered by the city for the worship of its
own greatness, while the rambling villages on the
south bank of the river were replaced by neat
suburbs " upon a regular plan, and laid out into a
number of right-lined streets "; there followed the
Trades Hall, the Royal Infirmary, the Assembly
Rooms, the Grammar School, the Bridewell, the
Theatre, the Courts of Justice with pillared hall and
Doric frieze, and, to crown the work, a magnificent
domed Lunatic Asylum to house one hundred and
twenty patients, erected " by public contribution to
restore the use of reason."
When Watt arrived this transformation had hardly
begun. The city, proud of its accumulated wealth,
was preparing to throw itself into the task of
winning the respect and admiration of the modern
world by success in those pursuits which the modern
world then most valued. But in the eyes of many the
renown it was already enjoying, when seized by
restless ambition for something greater, was more
worth than any it has since achieved. The University
was at the height of its fame. The impulse given to
the study of Science by the Royal Society had
worked itself out, and a new inspiration was needed.
It came from a group of men in Glasgow who, while
laboriously creating a school of Science for their
own students, dazzled Europe by the brilliance of
their discoveries. The greatest of these, Joseph
Black, was now lecturing in the University and, as if
that were not lustre enough Adam Smith was
Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Watt met with much the same difficulties in
Glasgow as he had in London. Here, too, he was a "
foreigner," and a dangerous " foreigner," because he
did not wish humbly to study the craft in the shop
of a Master, but had every intention of setting up
shop for himself. His trade came under the
jurisdiction of the Incorporation of Hammermen,
and this precious collection of industrial autocrats,
worthy men, no doubt, but intellectually hammers
indeed as compared with Watt's gimlet, refused him
permission to work within the town in any capacity
whatever, in spite of the fact that there was not one
of them who pretended to understand the rudiments
of his particular craft. Watt was saved by one of
those odd coincidences that crop up from time to
time in the pages of history. Within a month of his
arrival in Glasgow, the University received a present
of a case of astronomical instruments from a rich
and eccentric merchant in Jamaica, of the name of
Alexander Macfarlane. Classes in physical astronomy
had recently been started, and the gift was most
opportune, but the sea voyage had thrown these
delicate instruments out of gear, and they needed
overhauling by an expert. Dr. Dick, in whose charge
they were placed, remembered his young friend and
asked him to undertake the work. Watt was
delighted to have this chance of proving his skill,
and had soon put the whole collection into perfect
order, for which service the University voted him
the sum of five pounds. When, shortly afterwards, it
was heard that he had been refused leave to have a
workshop in the town, the University took him
under its protection and gave him a room within the
walls of the College, where the writ of the
Hammermen did not run.
This was the turning-point in his life. Watt was
already a brilliant mechanic, but he would never
have won fame as an engineer if he had not also
become a brilliant scientist. That side of his genius
had hitherto been starved. In the University he
found himself for the first time in the society of men
who were his equals in intellect and his superiors in
scientific experience. And these men, being pioneers
in an unconquered territory, had none of the pride
that makes the professional refuse to associate with
the amateur, nor did they, like some jealous
guardians of accumulated knowledge, feel
proprietary about their science and resentful against
trespassers.
It was as " Mathematical instrument maker to the
University " that Watt gained admission to the
precincts of the College in the summer of I757> but
as soon as his remarkable gifts were recognised, he
was treated by both Professors and students as a
friend and colleague rather than as an employee. The
initial steps were made easy for him by the fact that
he was already known personally to some of the
University staff. Professor Muirhead, a relative of his
mother, who had first introduced him to Dr. Dick
was still there; and when Dick died, early in I7577
his successor as Professor of Natural Philosophy
was Anderson, the brother of one of Watt's school
friends. Anderson was a young man, not more than
eight years senior to Watt, and provided an excellent
channel of approach to the keener scientists both of
the older and the younger generation. Watt's
workshop was in the inner court of the College and
communicated with the premises occupied by the
Natural Philosophy department. Teachers and
students would look in as they were coming away
from their work, to consult him about some piece of
apparatus or to give him an instrument to repair. His
friends dropped in to chat with him and brought
their friends. Before long they were discussing with
him not only the intricacies of apparatus but the
scientific problems on which they were engaged in
research. His shop became the regular meeting-place
for those who were doing original work and who
liked to put up for criticism the tentative theories
suggested to them by the results of their
experiments. More than once a Professor got a
valuable hint from some swift thought hatched in
the brain of the young craftsman and flung over his
shoulder as he worked at his bench.
Of all the friends he made at this time the two who
most deeply influenced his future were Joseph Black
and John Robison. Black was a scientific genius of
the first order. He had that rare gift of imaginative
insight that is not afraid to leap into a new world of
speculation, finding, as it were by inspiration, a fresh
significance in facts that have long been known to
all. But he was not a wild guesser. " No man," said
Adam Smith, who knew him well, " has less
nonsense in his head than Dr. Black," and he
combined this freedom of vision with an unrivalled
lucidity of exposition and accuracy of experiment.
Lord Brougham had heard him lecture and wrote of
him, " I have heard the greatest understandings of
the age giving forth their efforts in its most eloquent
tongues, but I should, without hesitation, prefer, for
mere intellectual gratification, to be once more
allowed the privilege which I in those days enjoyed
of being present while the first philosopher of his
age was the historian of his own discoveries."
Black had come across Watt when he was at work
on Macfarlane's instruments. He would come and
stand in the shop toying with a quadrant and
whistling softly to himself. But it was not till later,
when he got him to make some apparatus for his
experiments, that he became aware of Watt's genius.
" I found him," he says, " to be a young man
possessing most uncommon talents for mechanical
knowledge and practice, with an originality,
readiness and copiousness of invention which often
surprised and delighted me in our frequent
conversations together." The two men became close
friends, and Black's affection for Watt lasted to the
end of his life. When he was an old man a friend
brought him news of Watt's triumph at law over an
infringer of his patent. The old scientist, weakened
by years of illness, wept with joy; and then
apologised. " It is very foolish, but I can't help it,
when I hear of anything good to Jamie Watt." Watt
profited immeasurably from his contact with this
inspiring mind, and was also kept in touch with the
most advanced scientific thought of the day. He
realised his debt to Black. " To him I owe," he said,
" in great measure my being what I am; he taught me
to reason and experiment in natural philosophy, and
was always at true friend and adviser."
Robison was a younger man, who had just graduated
when Watt arrived in the University. Though an able
scientist, good enough to be elected Professor both
in Glasgow and Edinburgh, he was not the same
calibre as Black. But he had great vitality and
enthusiasm, qualities which made him an ideal
companion for Watt when his bouts of ill-health
made him talk of giving up work altogether Robison
quickly recognised that Watt was his superior, and
always generously admitted it. He has described his
first conversation with Watt in his workshop in the
College: " I saw a workman, and expected no more;
but was surprised to find a philosopher, as young as
myself, and always ready to instruct me. I had the
vanity to think myself a pretty good proficient in my
favourite study, and was rather mortified at finding
Mr. Watt so much my superior." They became
friends, but Robison's adventurous tastes carried
him away to sea very soon afterwards. He was
attached to Admiral Knowles and was one of those
who heard Wolfe recite Gray's " Elegy " as he went
his rounds on the eve of the attack on the heights of
Abraham. Four years later he returned, and renewed
his friendship. He found that, thanks to his more
systematic training, he could help Watt by testing
and analysing " the random suggestions of his
inquisitive and inventive mind." But Watt was the
leader, and "was continually striking into untrodden
paths, where I was always obliged to be a follower."
Watt had by this time a wide reputation. The young
enthusiasts clustered round him. " Whenever any
puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr.
Watt. He needed only to be prompted; everything
became to him the beginning of a new and serious
study; everything became science in his hands."
Meanwhile Watt's business was growing. The
University, when granting him quarters, had not
stipulated that he should work only for them. On
the contrary, he was provided with a room fronting
the street, where he could offer for sale to the public
the instruments he made in his workshop. In order
to develop this side of the business he went into
partnership, in I759 with a man named Craig, who
undertook to provide most of the capital needed for
expansion, and to do all the commercial
transactions, which Watt, then as ever afterwards,
detested. They started with a stock and cash worth
£200, and about five years later were making gross
sales up to £600 a year, and kept a staff of sixteen
men at work. It was Watt's reputation as a universal
mechanical expert that brought so much custom to
his shop. When anything had to be done and there
was no one in Glasgow who knew how to do itÑ
which was oftenÑit was taken round to Watt. He
was always ready to try. If the instrument to be
repaired was one that he had never seen before, he
set to work to master its principles with what help
he could get from the library, and was not satisfied
until he had put it to rights. And what he learned he
never forgot. In this way he repaired and afterwards
made, fiddles, guitars and flutes, although he could
not tell one note of music from another. When a
Masonic Lodge in Glasgow wanted an organ, the
officers went to Watt. " We imagined that Mr. Watt
could do anything; he was asked if he could build
this organ. He said 'Yes."' He sat down to study the
theory of music, thoroughly examined the
mechanism of the best organ he could find, and
devised an exact method by which he could tune the
pipes by observing "the beats of imperfect
consonances." By the time the work was completed
Watt had made substantial contributions, not only to
the mechanics of organ design, but also to the
theory of sound. Soon after he formed his -
partnership with Craig, Watt had opened a shop in
the town, though still living in the College. In I763
he became engaged to be married to his cousin,
Margaret Miller, and so took a house, into which he
moved in the following year. In I765 he was
married, and in the same year his partner died. But
before this he had begun his experiments on the
steam-engine, and in order that their nature and
value may be made clear, we must pause in the
narrative to consider the point the steam-engine had
reached in its evolution when Watt turned his
attention to it.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Great Invention and its Predecessors
"As the Births of Living Creatures, at first, are ill-
shapen, 80 are all Innovations, which are the births
of Time."ÑBACON.
MAN has always been observant, inquisitive, and
lazy; and he has,through life, a child's passion for
toys. Consequently, when the Creator set man, fire,
and water in the world together, it was evident that
ultimately the steamengine would have its place
among the births of Time. The first steps towards its
invention are blurred and unrecognisable, for there
are no periods in the infancy of thought. That
benefactor of humanity who first boiled water in a
vessel remains unknown. We must hurry down the
ages to a point where time has measurable length,
and the features of history take shape before us, as
the sleepers between the rails detach themselves into
an expanding series as the eye travels home along
the track from the farthest limit of vision to the
ground at our feet. Man is beginning to play with
this new element. He has discovered that it has force
and that with its help he can make toys that work.
Heat water in the hollow hub of a wheel, and the
steam, driven along the radiating tubes that are the
spokes, will issue violently from the nozzles of those
spouts, all bent one way, and drive it spinning as a
catherine-wheel is driven. Or make a hollow doll of
brass, with a hole for his mouth, fill him with water
and set him by the fire. As the water boils, the steam
will issue in a strong, steady blast from his mouth,
and he will seem to blow the fire that heats him.
From 200 B.C. to A.D. I600 steam was little more
than a toy; then the laziness of man prompted him
to use this force to ease his labour. It is said that a
Spaniard drove a boat by steam in I543~~ but, as
nobody knows how he did it, we pass on to
Solomon De Caus. He was an engineer and architect
to Louis XIII of France, who came to England in
I6I2 and was employed by the Prince of Wales to
embellish his gardens at Richmond. He invented
means for raising water above the height of its
source and so constructing ornamental falls and
fountains. One method was by the use of fire. He
took a metal globe and partly filled it with water
through a cock, which was then closed. Through the
top of the globe he inserted a vertical pipe, the lower
end of which came down nearly to the bottom of his
globe and was therefore under the water. Then he
applied the fire. The heated air and steam pressed on
the surface of the water in the vessel and forced it to
escape by the only way open to it, namely, up the
pipe and out as a jet from the top. The result was a
toy fountain. It was of no practical use, and could
hardly be called an engine, but it is worth describing
as being the simplest example of one of the methods
of raising water with the aid of fire.
The next claimant to a place on the roll of inventors
is Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester. He was
altogether a fantastic character. Having acted as
Charles I's agent in some of his wildest schemes
during the Civil War, he escaped to France. But he
got tired of life abroad, and, although he had been
condemned to death in his absence, he returned to
England. Whether it was the calm assurance of the
man, or the memory of his reputation for fabulous
wealth, or some irresistible magnetism in his
personality, it is impossible to say, but instead of
being immediately put to death he was sent to the
Tower, and after two years released with a pension.
It was at this time that he wrote his amazing book,
entitled X Century of the Names and Scantlings of
the Marquis of Worcester's Inventions, which he
published after the Restoration with an effusive
dedication to Charles II, in which he offered it to his
King as an indication of the ways in which he might
still be of service to him.
At the first glance it appears to be the work of a
lunatic. Closer study shows that the Marquis had
simply collected every ingenious device he had ever
met with in life, literature or legend, and boldly
claimed that he possessed the secret of each without
venturing to explain what that secret was. This type
of invention is impressive without being difficult.
There are several shorthand alphabets and codes,
several portable fortifications and repeating pistols, a
watch that goes for ever, a perpetual motion, a
torpedo, an " artificial bird," " a most conceited
tinder box," and an automatic horse that a man may
ride " using the decent posture with bon grace."
King Charles is told by this unemployed commander
of royalist armies and negotiator of secret treaties
how he may make a head of brass or stone, which, if
he whispers a question in its ear, " will presently
open its mouth, and resolve the question in French,
Latin, Welsh, Irish or English, in good terms
uttering it out of his mouth, and then shutting it
until the next question be asked." Among these
marvels are some machines for raising water, mostly
by buckets working over wheels and pulleys. Two of
these are interesting, Number 68 called " A Fire
WaterWork," and Number I00 modestly described
by its author as " the most stupendious work in the
whole world." Number 68 was clearly a steamengine
on the principle of De Caus, only differing from his
in that it had a separate boiler for generating the
steam. Number I00 is not clearly enough described
to be reconstructed, but it seems to have been some
kind of water-wheel worked by a man whose
strength was multiplied by a system of weights and
pulleys. Now it is known that a water-engine was set
up by the Marquis at Vauxhall; several people report
having seen it. Was it Number 68? If so, the Marquis
had turned De Caus's toy into a fullsized steam-
engine of practical value. Unfortunately none of
those who saw it make any mention of the use of
fire; their descriptions suggest that it was not a
steamengine at all, but the quite unoriginal and
unimportant Number I00. This last of the century,
though the least ingenious of the collection, was the
inventor's chief pride, the darling of his heart. Was
this because it was the only one of the hundred that
ever materialised ? It seems highly probable; and the
Marquis of Worcester must be classed among those
brilliant charlatans who never lack a train of devoted
disciples.
Real progress began with the work of Dionysius
Papin. He was a French doctor who fled from his
country in I68I to escape the persecution of
Protestants, settled in London, and became a Fellow
of the Royal Society. Shortly before this a line of
inquiry started by Galileo, and pursued by his pupils
in Italy, had led to a very important discovery. It
used to be said that " Nature abhors a vacuum."
This peculiarly unscientific and almost mystic
statement of the case had proved very misleading.
The Italians now discovered that it was nonsense to
talk as if there were special laws of nature relating to
a vacuum it was simply a question of the pressure of
the atmosphere. The air is exerting a continuous
pressure in all directions. As it is in all directions it
normally has no effect on the objects it surrounds,
for the pressure is perfectly balanced. But if you can
withdraw the air from one side of a body there is
nothing to balance the pressure on the other. The
body is therefore propelled into the vacuum with a
force equal to the pressure of the atmosphere. Here
was a universal, everpresent force provided by
nature free of charge, constant where wind and
water are fickle, and not liable, like steam, to become
unruly and burst the vessels intended to contain it.
And this admirable force had not yet been pressed
into the service of man.
The chief obstacle to the use of atmospheric
pressure to drive a machine was the difficulty of
producing the vacuum. To Papin belongs the credit
for having thought of employing steam to do this.
He took a cylinder, open at the top like a shellcase
that has been converted into a flowervase, and fitted
it with a piston. He put a little water in the bottom
of the cylinder, lowered the piston till it rested on
the surface, and set it over a fire. As the water
boiled, the piston was raised to the top, while the
cylinder filled with steam. There it was locked with a
catch, and the fire was removed. As the cylinder
cooled, the steam was condensed and became once
more a layer of water on the bottom, leaving a
vacuum under the piston. When the catch was
released the piston made a powerful stroke, driven
down by the pressure of the atmosphere which now
had no resistance to overcome. He then replaced the
fire and started again. Such was Papin's engine,
clumsy and desperately slow in working, but rich in
suggestions for future engineers.
The scene now shifts to Devonshire. Thomas Savery
was born in a village not far from Plymouth about
the year I650. He was a military engineer and also a
clever clockmaker. Whereas De Caus and Papin had
started their investigations as scientists trying to
fathom the mysteries of nature, Savery began from
the other end. He had often travelled about in
Cornwall, and had seen for himself the difficulties
the tin miners were having in keeping their mines
clear of water. The workings had reached a depth at
which the old pumps ceased to function, and there
was pressing need for something more powerful.
Savery tackled this problem as a practical man and
an engineer, and he invented an engine, patented in
I698~~ which was actually introduced into some of
the mines.
His method was as follows.
He filled a vessel with steam, and then, by pouring
cold water over it, condensed the steam and created
a vacuum. So far he wasfollowing Papin, except that
he generated the steam in a separate boiler which he
could keep constantly hot, whereas Papin boiled his
water in the cylinder in which he condensed it, and
so had to keep taking the fire away and putting it
back again. That alone was a big saving. But Savery
did not use a piston Having got the vacuum, he
opened a pipe that communicated directly with the
water to be raised, and up it rushed into his vessel.
In this way he could get the water up about 30 feet.
That was not enough, so he now applied De Caus's
system to force it higher. He turned on the steam
again, at high pressure, and it acted on the water in
the vessel and drove it up and out through an
ejection pipe. The remarkable thing about this
engine was that it sometimes worked. Sometimes,
not always. For the utmost skill of the blacksmith of
those days was not equal to constructing a boiler
that could be relied on to contain itself when tickled
by high-pressure steam. Bursts and leakages were
common, and the engineman led a perilous
existence.
The fact that a steam-engine had actually been used,
with some measure of success, to drain a mine was a
great stimulus to further efforts, and they were
quickly forthcoming. Thomas New comen, a
Dartmouth blacksmith, knew what Savery was
doing; he may even have been employed by him as a
mechanic on his engines. He also had, with the help
of Dr. Hooke of the Royal Society, studied the
experiments of Papin. He either got from Hooke, or
himself conceived, the idea of combining the
advantages of both. Savery's machine was in itself a
pump. It sucked the water up into its own bowels.
Newcomen proposed to build an engine that would
simply provide the power, and then to use it to drive
an ordinary suction pump which would raise the
water. This had been Papin's intention, but he had
left the work unfinished. He airily remarked that the
manner of using his engine to " dis charge iron
bullets to a great distance, to propel ships against the
wind," and so forth, " would be too long here to
detail; but each individual must select the
construction of machinery appro priate to his
purpose." This is what Newcomen did. He took
Papin's piston and cylinder and made it pull down
one end of a beam, pivoted in the centre, to the
other end of which was attached the rod of a
common pump. But at the same time he applied
Savery's improvement by generating the steam in a
separate boiler, and leading the steam from it to the
cylinder, where it was condensed by a douche of
cold water. Savery complained that this was an
infringement of his patent, but was pacified by being
taken into partnership. The first successful model
was completed in I705 and the first engine was set
up at Wolverhampton in I 7 I 2.
We must now return to James Watt at Glasgow. It
was in the year I759 that he first turned his attention
to steam-engines. The suggestion came from
Robison. He knew that steamengines were being
used to pump mines and was not thinking about
ways of improving them, but of possible new uses
for steam. Might it not be used to drive carriages on
wheels? Why not invent a steam locomotive ? Savery
had had the same idea, but nobody had yet
succeeded in carrying it out. It will be remembered
that Robison said of Watt, " He needed only to be
prompted; everything became to him the beginning
of a new and serious studyÑ everything became
science in his hands." Well, he had now been
prompted. And Robison. was quite right. He did not
play with the idea, he worked at it. He first tried, as
any one would, to drive his engine by the pressure of
steam itself. This seems so obvious, that people
often wonder why engineers at first preferred the far
more complicated and round-about way of using
steam only as a means for making a vacuum, and so
bringing the pressure of the atmosphere into play.
The explanation is simple. If atmospheric resistance
is not removed by means of a vacuum, it must be
overcome by the driving. force of the steam. The
steam must be used at high pressure. Now in the
eighteenth century mechanical technique was not
good enough either to produce a steady supply of
high-pressure steam, or to contain or control it if
produced. Watt, therefore, like his predecessors,
soon gave up his attempt to devise a high-pressure
engine, because he was " sensible it would be liable
to some of the objections against Savery's engine,
viz. the danger of bursting the boiler, and the
difficulty of making the joints tight."
In later years Watt would never have begun to
experiment on a problem until he had studied and
mastered everything that had been done or written
on the subject by any one before him. Even now he
soon checked his hasty enthusiasm and sat down to
complete his education. He read a few standard
works. Then he wanted to see an example of the
latest type of engine in use. He discovered that the
University possessed a model of a Newcomen
engine, but that it was at the moment in London,
undergoing repairs. It was probably at Watt's
suggestion that Professor Anderson recovered this
model from London and handed it over to him to
be put into working order. This was in the winter of
I763. At first he was not thinking of theories. " I set
about repairing it," he says, " as a mere
mechanician." But when he had finished, although
the model was mechanically as perfect as any
fullsized engine, it would only make two or three
strokes at a time, and then expired. Here was a
puzzle of a new kind. It led him away from the
purely mechanical aspects of the problem; it "
became science in his hands." He saw that heat was
being wasted. In the big engines the cylinder was
made of castiron; in the model it was of brass, a
better conductor of heat. Therefore energy was
going astray, as it were, in heating the cylinder. He
saw that the toy cylinder " exposed a greater surface
to condense the steam in proportion to its content "
than a big cylinder. Therefore, when the cold
cylinder was being filled with steam, a great deal was
uselessly turned to water. From this he saw that the
model was more wasteful than a real engine. But he
also saw, and this is much more important, that even
in a full-sized engine with a perfectly proportioned
cylinder of the most suitable material known to exist
there would still be waste of energy and loss of
power, arising from the very principle on which the
machine worked. He determined to find out what
that waste amounted to. In doing this he was led
into a series of elaborate scientific experiments on
the nature of heat and the properties of steam.
Three aspects of the problem occupied him. It had
already been shown by experiment that, when
subjected to a pressure lower than that of the
atmosphere, water would boil at a temperature lower
than the ordinary boilingpoint. Watt carefully
worked out a scale showing at what temperature
water will boil at every pressure from nil upwards. In
his neat, precise way, he reduced a general theory to
an exact, quantitative form. Then he went on to
discover the relation between the volume of a given
quantity of water and the volume of steam, at the
temperature of boiling water, into which it could be
converted. Others had tried to do this before, but
Watt's researches proved that their conclusions were
at fault. His scientific mind, aided by his mechanical
genius for experiment, enabled him to get results
that far surpassed in accuracy anything that had been
done before. Finally he was struck by the
extraordinary heating-power of steam. On devising
some experiments he came to the surprising
conclusion that water converted into steam can heat
six times its own weight of cold water up to the
boilingpoint. Thinking that he must have blundered
somewhere, he consulted Black. He then learned
that he had stumbled on the fact, the discovery and
explanation of which had made Black famous,
namely, the phenomenon of Latent! Heat. When
water is boiling, however much you go on heating it,
it will get no hotter. The steam receives the heat
without raising its own temperature and holds it in
store. This heat is described as " latent." If the steam
is driven through a volume of cold water it naturally
condenses, and in so doing it releases its store of
latent heat, which all goes to raise the temperature of
the water. In other words, the heating power of a
certain quantity of water at a temperature of 2I2¡ is
trifling compared with the heating power of the
same quantity of water converted into steam also at
a sensible temperature of 2I2¡.
In order to appreciate the way in which Watt applied
these scientific observations to the problem of
perfecting the steam-engine, it is essential to
understand exactly how the Newcomen engine of
the day worked. With the aid of a diagram that
should not be difficult. The figure on page 7 I
represents an engine of this type reduced to the
simplest terms. A is a furnace, and B is a boiler in
which steam is generated. The boiler communicates
by a pipe in which is a cock, a, with the cylinder, C,
in which works a piston, D. It will be noticed that
the cylinder is open at the top. The rod of the piston
is attached to a beam, EE, pivoted at the centre, to
the other end of which is fastened the rod of a
pump, G. and on this rod is a weight, F. H is a
cistern of cold water with a pipe running down into
the bottom of the cylinder in such a way that,
whenever the cock, h, is opened, a jet of water IS
injected into the cylinder. Imagine the beam EE
horizontal. The cock b is opened, letting steam into
the cylinder. This balances the pressure of the
atmosphere on the piston, and the weight F. finding
no resistance at the other end of the beam, sinks
down to the position shown in the diagram, drawing
the piston to the top of the cylinder. The cylinder is
now full of steam. When the cock b is shut, the cock
h is opened, letting a jet of cold water enter the
cylinder, which at once condenses the steam and
creates a vacuum. The piston then makes its stroke,
driven by atmospheric pressure, and so raises the
pump rod. But there is now some water in the
cylinder, partly condensed steam, partly the water
that formed the jet. When, therefore, cock b is
opened again, cock c is also opened, and this water
is drained away down the pipe that enters the
bottom of the cylinder on the left in the diagram. In
this way the pump is kept working .the stroke of the
piston sucking the water up into it, and the fall of
the weight driving it out again.
Watt, equipped with new knowledge, turned again to
his model. He could now calculate what volume of
steam was being generated for each stroke of the
piston. He compared this with the volume needed to
fill the cylinder, and found that it was three or four
times as great. In fact, as much as three-quarters of
the steam was being wasted. His precise, orderly
mind was shocked by this discovery. And the defect
was not due to some detail in the machine; it was
fundamental. To condense the steam and create a
vacuum, the cylinder had to be cooled. When fresh
steam was admitted for the next stroke it went on
condensing, uselessly, until it had heated the cylinder
up to its own temperature. There lay the waste. It
had been worse still in the first Newcomen engines,
where the cylinder was cooled by being douched
with cold water outside. The internal jet condensed
the steam without making the walls of the cylinder
so cold. That was why it had been adopted. But the
waste of steam, though reduced, was still enormous.
The obvious lesson to be learned from this was that
the jet must be as small as possible in order to cool
the cylinder as little as possible. His observations on
Latent Heat taught that when the steam in the
cylinder was being condensed it gave out its
immense store of heat, which went to raise the
temperature of the water that had been injected.
There was a danger that, instead of the cold water
condensing the steam, the steam would vaporise the
water. If this happened at all, the vacuum would be
incomplete, and there would be some steam left in
the cylinder to resist the descent of the piston. His
first series of experiments had shown him that, as
the water was in a vacuum, it did not need to be
heated to boiling point, namely 212¡~~ before it
turned to vapour; it would boil at the much lower
temperature of I00¡. The conclusion was that the
machine was, in fact, always being clogged by
vapour under the piston, and the only way to reduce
this defect was to inject a lot of cold water, too
much for the steam to heat to I00¡; the jet must be
as large as possible.
He seemed to be stuck. If the oracle of science,
when consulted by its most accomplished high
priest, replies that the jet must be as small as
possible, but, on the other hand, it must be as large
as possible, the inquirer can only curse the oracle
and make a jet of medium size. This was precisely
what the engineers had done. But Watt was not
satisfied. An engine that was so wasteful offended
his sense of mechanical beauty. He refused to
confess himself beaten. " Nature," he used to say, "
has a weak side, if we can only find it out." He put
his case to himself in a new way. The cylinder must
never be at a temperature of less than 2I2¡ otherwise
steam will be prematurely condensed and wasted.
The cylinder must always be at a temperature of less
than I00¡otherwise the water that is injected will turn
to vapour and obstruct the action of the Pi machine.
Was that any more helpful ? It hardly seemed so.
For days he walked about torturing his brain in the
effort to achieve the impossible. Then quite
suddenly the simple and obvious solution dawned
on him. It all happened on a Sunday afternoon walk.
There must be two different temperatures. Very
well; then there must be two separate vessels. Keep
the cylinder always hot, and condense the steam
somewhere else. Make a separate condenser,
communicating with the cylinder, and keep that
always cold. Not a particle of heat will be wasted.
Start with both the cylinder and the condenser full
of steam. Condense the steam in the condenser and
make a vacuum there. In will rush the steam from
the cylinderÑfor steam is elasticÑmaking a vacuum
there, at second hand, as it were. Down will come
the piston. The thing is done. " I had not walked
farther than the Golf House when the whole thing
was arranged in my mind."
When the substance of Watt's great invention is put
down in black and white it hardly seems to provide a
sufficient excuse for writing a biography of the
inventor. It merely carried the improvements of
Savery and Newcomen one step farther. Papin had
one vessel only, which served as boiler, cylinder and
condenser. Newcomen, in order to reduce the waste
of heat, adopted Savery's idea and had two separate
vessels, a boiler and a cylinder- condenser. Watt, in
order to reduce the waste still further, had three.
But technically Watt's claim to the title of inventor
of the steam- engine is indisputable. Newcomen's
machine made use of steam, but it was driven by the
force of the atmosphere, and was often, with ~
greater accuracy, called an " atmospheric engine."
The nature of Watt's improvement led him to cut
out the air altogether. He wanted to keep the
cylinder hot, and contact with the air was bound to
cool it. There must, however, be some kind of "
atmosphere " to press on the piston and drive it into
the vacuum. Watt set the cylinder, just as it was, in
an air-tight case filled with steam. As steam is elastic
and expansive, it pressed on the piston in exactly the
same way as the atmosphere in Newcomen's engine.
Here, then, was an engine driven by the pressure of
steam alone, the first real " steamengine." But it did
not require that dangerous and expensive article,
highpressure steam. It was satisfied with the safe,
familiar, low-pressure steam, assisted in its action by
a vacuum that eliminated resistance.
Watt's invention led directly to a further
improvement of equal importance. Up till now
engines had only one driving stroke, the downward
one. The piston was drawn up by a weight on the far
end of the beam. This was still the case in Watt's
first engines. It could not be otherwise, since he
used an open cylinder sitting in an atmosphere of
steam. Very soon, however, he abandoned this in
favour of a closed cylinder communicating at both
ends with the boiler.l Now, when the piston was at
the bottom, the steam above it was in an enclosed
space in which a vacuum could be created by
condensation, exactly as for the downward stroke.
This would give the engine two driving strokes
instead of one.
Naturally this point did not escape Watt, but he did
not introduce it into his patented designs till I782.
The reason was this. The " doubleacting " engine
required a very complicated mechanism to connect
the cylinder twice over both with the boiler and with
the condenser, and to provide for the automatic
opening and shutting of the various taps at the right
moment. The single engine already overtaxed the
intelligence of the average engineer; Watt trembled
to think what might happen if he introduced him to
the double. He was only waiting till the simpler
machine had proved its worth and been accepted by
the industrial world; then he offered them the
creations of his riper genius.
But Watt's claim is not a technical one only.
Newcomen's engine was a rarity, and was bound to
remain a rarity, because it was uneconomical; there
were few industries in which it could pay its way.
Watt's engine, owing to its superiority in efficiency
and economy, was able to spread from the mines to
the iron foundries, from the iron foundries to the
corn mills, from the corn mills to the cotton
factories, until the industry of the nation had been
transformed. Nor was his success due simply to the
fact that his invention came at the crucial moment,
and put the finishing touch to work done by others,
for which others deserve the credit. Watt's
contributions demanded higher qualities than were
possessed by any of his predecessors. Papin was a
clever scientist; Newcomenwas an ingenious
mechanic. But Watt was a greater scientist than
Papin and a greater mechanic than Newcomen. His
invention was not just a happy inspiration. It was the
fruit of months of hard work which no one without
his genius could have accomplished. The solution
seems simple, because he had thoroughly analysed
every factor in the problem and reduced it to its
simplest form. That was the most diflicult part of his
task, demanding the brain of a scientist guided by
the instincts of a mechanic. Newcomen had never
realised what the problem was; Papin could never
have solved it in practice. Watt saw it, explored it,
and pressed on to its solution by a process of
irresistible logic.
But that was not the end. There followed years of
hard work, demanding the supreme skill of the
mechanic guided by the brain of the scientist. The
invention was made in I765 and patented in I769 but
it was ten years before he had produced an engine
that satisfied him.
All that time he was toiling away at the mechanical
details, trying various forms of condenser,
experimenting in devices for keeping the piston tight
in the cylinder, and going over all the valves, cocks
and connecting mechanism to make sure that
everywhere there was perfect accuracy and perfect
economy. When he had finished, the engine was, so
far as the craftsmanship of the day allowed, a work
of art. It was as different from its predecessors as
the modern bicycle is from the velocipede of the
'eighties. In creating the steam-engine Watt created
the science of mechanical engineering.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Partnership of Watt and Roebuck
" I know Mammon too; Banks-of-England, Credit-
systems, world-wide possibilities of work and traffic;
and applaud and admire them. Mammon is like Fire;
the usefullest of all servants, if the frightfullest of all
masters."ÑCARLYLE.
WATT came home jubilant from his Sunday
afternoon walk on the Green, and sat down to think
out all the implications of his new idea. For two days
he enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of building engines
in the world of his imagination, watching the parts
fly to their places the instant they were conceived,
with never a leaky joint nor a broken screw. Swiftly
the perfect engine of his dreams took shape in his
mind. Then he turned from his arm-chair to his
laboratory bench. An apparatus was set up to test
the principles underlying the invention. The results
pleased him. He was convinced he was on the right
track. At the end of April, I765~ he wrote to a
friend a letter full of confidence. He had calculated
the capacities of his engine as compared with those
of the old type, " and if there is not some devil in the
hedge, mine ought to raise water to 44 feet with the
same quantity of steam that theirs does to 32.... In
short, I can think of nothing else but this machine. I
hope to have the decisive trial before I see you."
Shortly after this Robison, who had been away and
knew nothing of the invention, came back, and went
round to have a chat with him. He found Watt in his
room contemplating a little tin cistern which seemed
to absorb all his thoughts. Robison began talking
steam-engine " shop," telling Watt of some new
ideas that had occurred to him while he was away,
and might be of value for their work; for he always
regarded himself as a sort of partner in Watt's
researches. This time he was hopelessly out of date,
and the slightly lecturing tone jarred on Watt's
excited nerves. " You need not fash yourself any
more about that, man," he exclaimed sharply; " I
have now made an engine that shall not waste a
particle of steam. It shall all be boiling hotÑaye, and
hot water injected if I please." And he pushed the
little cistern out of sight under the table, and refused
to answer a single question.
He was proud of his secret then, and, strong in the
sense of his own power, he wanted nobody's help.
He was weary and heartbroken, ready to cling to any
one who had strength to support his weakness,
before the first of his engines was at work; and long
after that too.
His difficulties began when he started to makea
working model. A hundred tiresome problems of
detail were revealed which had not existed in the
immaterial world of his imagination. The piston
must fit tightly in the cylinder, but with as little
friction as possible. It was quite certain that no
craftsman then alive could make the metal parts so
accurately that they fulfilled these conditions without
other help. Newcomen had solved this problem by
having water lying on the top of the piston to
prevent the passage of air through the cracks. But
Watt's cylinder must be absolutely dry. He tried
every kind of padding: cork, tallow, horse-dung,
collars of cloth treated with varnish, or pasteboard
soaked in linseed oil. The exact form of the
condenser was another source of trouble. Many
patterns were tried and rejected before he was
satisfied. Then the condenser had to be drained of
the water that formed in it. By this time he was
getting irritable and impatient. When the faithful
Robison meekly suggested some special kind of
education pipe for this purpose, he burst out, " Oh,
man, do you imagine me so dull as not to have
thought on that long ago P " His mind was working
faster than it had ever worked before; every nerve
was strained for speed. He was like a hound in full
cry called back to inspect a rabbit hole.
The most maddening part of it was that he, who was
accustomed to work with apapparatus fashioned
with all the delicacy of his own exquisite skill, was
now, when practising " mechanics in great," as he
called it, compelled to accept the clumsy
approximations of the local blacksmith. He fumed
and fretted at the leisurely methods of the British
workman, and the moment the parts arrived, off he
darted to make the trial for which he had been
waiting impatiently for weeks, only to find that the
cylinder was untrue, or the pipes leaked, and he must
go home again, with his work at a standstill. At the
crucial moment his " old white-iron man," who
made the condensers, died, and he had to face the
exasperating task of training another to take his
place.
Nor did he make things any easier for his men. He
was a very exacting master, and nothing short of
perfection would satisfy him. The engine was his
noblest artistic creation, and he loved it as a child.
He could not bear to see its beauty marred by
clumsy hands. And his creative faculties never
rested; they were part of his vitality, and could not
be turned off like a tap while the mechanics were at
work. Consequently he was always making little
changes and revising the designs while the engine
was being built, greatly to the distress of the
builders. The confusion that resulted was often as
much his fault as theirs. The more he was worried,
the more inventive he became, for, said he, "
Thinking on these things is a kind of relief amidst
my vexations."
His next difficulties were financial. He was quite
convinced that his invention had a high commercial
value. It would be very profitable to somebody. But
in the meantime he wanted a few thousand pounds
to complete his experiments, build a factory, and
manufacture the engines that should persuade the
world that he was right. The profits would eventually
cover this outlay, but he wanted to spend those
profits in advance. Here enters the credit system.
The penniless inventor is at the mercy of Mammon.
His idea is barren and cannot give birth to wealth
until it has been fertilised by wealth. If Science is the
mother of invention, Finance is its father. To-day
the efforts of a highly organised matrimonial agency
keep up the birthrate. The commercial world bristles
with devices for bringing the two parents together.
There is a host of rich captains of industry on the
look out for new ideas, and behind these conduits
through which flows the money that irrigates the
fields of trade, are the reservoirs of the banks.
Behind them too is the sea of the money-making
public, ready to be enticed by the company
promoter to invest its savings in any venture that
promises high profits on the authority of high
personages. This feature of modern civilisation, like
nearly every other, dates, I as we have seen, from the
seventeenth century. In that fascinating and fertile
age banks and jointstock companies established
themselves as parts of the economic system, and up
and down the years heavily sported that quaint
monstrosity, that genius presiding at the birth of
speculation, the Projector. " Necessity, which is
allowed to be the Mother of Invention," wrote
Defoe, as he watched the old century dying, "has so
violently agitated the wits of men at this time, that it
seems not at all improper, by way of distinction, to
call it the Projecting Age."
The Projector, ancestor of the company promoter of
to-day, was dabbling in the mysteries of credit. He
muttered his spells, and the spirits of industry flew
to do his bidding. Even to him who spoke the word
it was a miracle, beyond the understanding of man.
There seemed to be no limit to this new-won power,
nothing that it could not accomplish. " Credit makes
the soldier fight without pay, the armies march
without provisions, and it makes tradesmen keep
open shop without stock. The force of credit is not
to be described by words; he that has credit is
invulnerable, whether he has money or no; nay, it
will make money." But if the magic lamp is rubbed
too often, the genie gets out of temper and out of
control. So it was with credit in the hands of these
ignorant miracle-workers. Adventures went amiss,
the bubble was pricked, and credit itself lost its
credit. The tragi-comic fiasco of the South Sea
Bubble struck a blow at Finance from which it was
slow to recover. Government, afraid lest it might do
more damage, put obstacles in the way of its
expansion. No joint-stock company might be
founded without sanction of an Act of Parliament.
Brokers must be licensed and must only do such
business as the authorities considered respectable,
and joint-stock banking was a monopoly in the
hands of the Bank of England.
As the eighteenth century wore on, the activities of
Finance revived. The Stock Exchange did a brisk
business, small private banks sprang up all over the
country, while brokers and jobbers never lacked
either customers or victims. Nevertheless in Watt's
day the financing of a new enterprise was a very
difficult operation. The banks were mostly small
affairs without substantial resources, and, as has
always been the practice in England, were not
prepared to take any of the risks of business. The
only type of company that could be floated without
a special Act of Parliament was an association which
the law treated as a partnership, and which did not
enjoy the privilege of limited liability. As the
ordinary investor is not prepared to shoulder the
risks and responsibilities of partnership or to stake
his entire property on a speculative venture, such
bodies did not find it easy to draw on the savings of
the general public. The investor's only chance, with
no bank to help him and no Projector to turn him
into a company, was to discover among the few
existing rich capitalists one who would go shares in
his idea for ready money. And even then he knew
that his partner would have to embark on the
perilous seas of financial speculation, trusting to the
crazy ship of an imperfect credit system which might
go to the bottom, carrying his invention with it.
Watt's best friend in these times of trial was Joseph
Black. He followed every step of his work with the
keenest interest, was always ready with precious
advice and stimulating suggestions, and he lent him
money. But Black knew well enough that the burden
of financing so big an enterprise was too heavy for
him to bear; knew, too, that in spite of his help, Watt
was already running heavily into debt. He began to
look for some one to take his place. The choice was
not wide. The sinking of large sums in this invention
was bound to be attended by risks. The engine had
not yet been proved a success; it could not be
proved successful until much money had been spent
on further experiments. Even if it passed all tests,
skill would be needed to find a market. There was an
active demand for it in the mines, but only on
condition that it was cheaper and more economical
than the engines already in use. Its introduction into
many other industries 87 depended on those
industries being remodelled so as to receive it. The
class of industrial capitalists, owners of big
workshops and factories, was a small one. The
wealth of the country was for the most part in the
hands either of landed gentry, who, if they had any
enterprise, found scope enough for it in those
agricultural pursuits which were just becoming
fashionable, or of merchants, who lived by trade,
both foreign and domestic, or by providing
employment to large numbers of scattered
craftsmen. To such men the invention of the steam-
engine was just a little commotion under the surface
in a remote and unfamiliar corner of the world of
industry. It was of no use to them; they could not
estimate its possible value to others. Support had to
be found in that section of the economic world
which the engine was designed immediately to serve.
The man who at once occurred to Black was his
friend Dr. Roebuck. Roebuck was a Birmingham
physician who had taken up the study of chemistry
and its application to the processes of industry. His
first commercial success was a factory for the
manufacture of sulphuric acid established at
Prestonpans. From this he passed on to iron. The
iron trade had been revolutionised earlier in the
century by the discovery of a method of smelting
with coke instead of charcoal as fuel. The process
needed a big plant, and the use of mechanical means
for getting a powerful blast. The trade now offered
great scope for individual enterprise both in
organisation and in technical development, especially
as the processes subsequent to smelting had hardly
been touched by the earlier invention. Roebuck
chose as his site the banks of the river Carron in
Stirlingshire, not far from Falkirk. The Carron
Ironworks, planned on an imposing scale and built
with the aid of the engineer Smeaton, were formally
opened on the 1st of January, I760.
Roebuck seemed to be the ideal man for the
purpose. He was extremely wealthy, and had a
natural sympathy with any bold enterprise. He was a
scientist, and could be expected to appreciate, even
from an imperfect model, the possibilities of the
engine. He himself stood to gain by the invention,
since the chief obstacle to progress in his industry
was the limit to the efficiency of water-power as a
means to work the bellows that drove the air into
the blastfurnaces. Finally, his establishment could
easily be adapted to the manufacture of engines on a
large scale. Black, therefore, introduced the two
men, and in the summer of I765 they entered into
correspondence with one another.
The character of this early correspondence was
ominous. Roebuck was much attracted by Watt, but
he was full of caution. Before he com mitted himself
he wished to make certain that the invention was
sound; he bombarded Watt with questions and
irritated him with worthless criticism. Watt was by
this time satisfied with the performances of his first
model and ready to start on a larger and more
perfect one. For Roebuck's sake he had to go over
all the ground again and explain to him the nature
and results of his original scientific experiments.
And Roebuck was a somewhat sceptical pupil. He
even questioned the necessity for a separate
condenser, the basic idea of the invention, and much
valuable time was wasted in trying alternatives which
Watt knew well were useless. There were
disadvantages in having a partner who professed to
be a scientist as well as a financier. It was a further
disappointment to Watt to find that, when he sent
drawings of a piston and cylinder to be cast at
Carron for use in a big-scale model, the cylinder
"was very illbored, and thereby useless, though the
best Carron could make." The least he had expected
to get out of the connection with Roebuck was
access to first-rate workmanship.
After more than a year's careful consideration,
Roebuck decided to take the risk and entered into an
agreement with Watt. He undertook to pay his
outstanding debt of £I000 and to bear all future cost
of experiments and of securing a patent. In return
for this he was to have two-thirds of the property of
the invention. It really seemed as if all worries of
finance and business management had been lifted
off Watt's shoulders, leaving him free to devote
himself uninterruptedly to the experimental side of
the work. And there still remained much to be done.
The partners were not yet ready to apply for a
patent. At the beginning of I 768 Watt was busy
with a model which was to be the last before they
embarked on a full-sized engine. He felt he was
making great progress. " I am going to be at home,
God willing, for some time," he wrote to his friend
Lind on 5th January. " I am going to try some things
I am persuaded you would like to see (perpetual
mobiles, the elixir magicum, and some other trifles
of that kind). Seriously, it would give me great
pleasure if you could spend a few weeks with me. I
think I could entertain you. What I knew about the
steamengine before you went away [December,
I765] was but a trifle to what I know now."
Evidently he was in high spirits. The future seemed
brighter now that he had Roebuck behind him. But,
in reality, he was just entering on the greatest crisis
of his life, the time when he came nearest to
throwing up the whole thing in despair.
His troubles began in April, and are related in a
series of letters to Roebuck. " I have been close
working at the engine since I wrote you, he writes on
April 1st, " but have not got it perfectly tight yet,
though it is much better.... I would write you
oftener, but my health is but indifferent, and I have
had no good news lately." Four days later he reports
that some mercury from the gaugepipe got into the
cylinder " and has played the devil with the solder.
This throws us back at least three days, and is very
vexatious." Then some slight defect led him to make
considerable changes in the design, and on May Ioth
he wrote: " I have got the two new exhausting
cylinders cast, bored, and partly turned; also the new
condensers made: and expect to have it going again
by the end of the week." A fortnight later he made a
very favourable report, concluding with the words, "
I sincerely wish you joy of this successful result, and
hope it will make you some return for the
obligations I ever will remain under to you." But
time passed and the indefatigable inventor was still
pulling his model to pieces in order to introduce the
new devices that were constantly cropping up in his
fertile brain. When October came, and the
experiments still dragged on, Roebuck began to lose
patience. He was satisfied with the model as it was.
The specifications for the patent were being
prepared, and he was eager to begin manufacturing
for the market. " I want much effectually to try the
machine at large," he wrote. " You are letting the
most active part of your life insensibly glide away. A
day, a moment, ought not to be lost. And you
should not suffer your thoughts to be diverted by
any other object, or even improvement of this, but
only the speediest and most effectual manner of
executing one of a proper size, according to your
present ideas."
But Watt was incorrigible and unrepentant. It was
useless to tell him not to think of improvements, or
to ask him to proceed on the lines of his " present
ideas," for his ideas changed daily, or even hourly.
So, although a patent was applied for, and
securedÑit bore date January 5th, I769Ñand
although plans were concocted for erecting a full-
size trial engine in a shed at the back of the doctor's
house at Kinneil, Watt went on tinkering at his
beloved model. " I wrote you last night of my having
taken asunder the engine to add an external cylinder
and a thinner bottom," he writes cheerfully in
February. And ten days later, " I made an imperfect
trial to-day of an alteration in the condenser, with
which I am much pleased "; but by the end of May
he was expressing equal satisfaction with a new
condenser of an entirely different pattern. The
unhappy Roebuck must have felt that there was
nothing more trying to the patience than to have
dealings with a man of genius.
Watt's genius was a tormentor to him as well as to
his friends. Its ceaseless bounding energy rattled the
frail body that it inhabited, as the imprisoned steam
shook the fabric of one of his engines. When his
health was bad he shrank from every effort except
that of his work. He was afraid of the journey from
Glasgow to Kinneil, which might have refreshed
him, because, he said, " I am far from well, and the
fatigue of the ride would disable me from doing
anything for three or four days." But he remained
chained to his workshop, wearing himself out with
labour which racking headaches often rendered quite
fruitless. His strength flagged before he could put
his ideas into effect. " Much contrived, and little
executed," he lamented. " How much would health
and spirits be worth to me ! " " I have found my
engine much better of the alterations I mentioned in
my last. Still plagued with headaches, and sometimes
heartaches. I received Mr. Boulton's, to whom my
compliments." It was as if, as he sat at his work, the
pain grew and mounted in his brain, and, suffusing
his thoughts, distilled one pure drop of misery on to
the paper before him amidst the jargon of valves and
cisterns. Sometimes he felt he had not made one
inch of progress since the day that the idea of the
engine first came to him. " I am not near so capable
as I was once. I find that I am not the same person I
was four years ago, when I invented the fire-engine,
and foresaw, even before I made a model, almost
every circumstance that has since occurred.... The
necessary experience in great was wanting; in
acquiring it I have met with many disappointments. I
must have sunk under the burthen of them if I had
not been supported by the friendship of Dr.
Roebuck. I have now brought the engine near a
conclusion, yet I am not in idea nearer that rest I
wish for than I was four years ago. However, I am
resolved to do all I can to carry on this business, and
if it does not thrive with me, I will lay aside the
burthen I cannot carry. Of all things in life there is
nothing more foolish than inventing. "
During all this time, and during the years that
followed in which the trial engine was being built at
Kinneil, Watt had to find means to earn his living.
The engine was not now costing him anything, but it
brought him no income, and he had a wife and two
children to support. At first he kept his odd mixed
business going at his Glasgow shop, but it declined
after the death of his partner, John Craig. The orders
sent by his rather thoughtless friends distracted him
from more important work. One of the earliest
letters from Roebuck, after discussing the science of
heat, concludes with a postscript: " The microscope
is safe arrived, and affords fine amusement; but Mrs.
Roebuck desires me to remind you of the guitar."
The guitar, forsooth ! when he was already engaged
in experiments on the steam engine. About the same
time he invented an ingenious machine for drawing
in perspective for which he had several orders at
three guineas apiece. As his reputation as an
engineer grew he was offered surveying work, which,
though not well paid, brought in a more regular
income than the chance sales of his little shop. His
first undertaking of any size was a canal to connect
Glasgow with the collieries at Monkland. The survey
was completed in I769 and he was then asked to
supervise the work of construction. Rather against
his better judgment he accepted, for he knew that
the work would be hard and would occupy him for
three or four days a week, but he could not afford to
throw away a chance of earning £200 a year. To his
surprise he found the open-air life suited him. " The
vaguing about the country, and bodily fatigue, have
given me health and spirits beyond what I
commonly enjoy at this dreary season, though they
would still thole amends. Hire yourself to somebody
for a ploughman; it will cure ennui." That was in
January I770 and he was at it all that year and
through the following winter. The work brought its
worries. It was new to him, and he kept meeting
problems that taxed his ingenuity to the full. Of
course the money ran out before the work was
finished, and he had troublesome negotiations to
conduct with con tractors and workmen. There was
nothing he hated more. " Nothing is more contrary
to my disposition than bustling and bargaining with
mankind: yet that is the life I now constantly
lead."<./p>
He was occupied with the Monkland Canal for over
two years, and then more work of the same kind
came along. He executed surveys for a number of
canals, some of which were carried out, others not.
Among them was a survey and estimate for a canal
from Fort William to Inverness, following the line of
the famous Caledonian Canal afterwards built by
Telford. His report was put on one side at the time,
but Telford came across it long afterwards among
some Treasury papers. " I believe it is yours," he
wrote to Watt, " because it is just and masterly; and I
have introduced in my Report your general
description, plainly saying that it could not be so well
told in any other words." Watt became more and
more absorbed in his new occupation. Naturally he
applied his inventive faculties to the instruments
used by surveyors, and produced quadrants and
micrometers and a " dividingscrew " that would
divide an inch into a thousand equal parts. He built a
bridge over the Clyde, and improved the harbours of
Greenock and Port-Glasgow.
All this employment, together with the host of little
scientific problems that he explored at this time,
served to distract his mind from his unlucky steam-
engine. For things were going very badly at Kinneil.
There was always something amiss with the trial
engine, and Watt's difficulties were increased by the
faultiness of the goods turned out by the Carron
works. The more distant success appeared, the more
readily Watt accepted other kinds of employment. "
I cannot," he wrote, " on an uncertainty, refuse every
piece of business that offers." He was constantly
away and tried to direct experiments by letter. To
make matters worse, Roebuck was in financial
difficulties. In order to get control of his raw
material he had taken a lease of the Duke of
Hamilton's coal-mines at Borrowston ness. The
speculation was a complete failure and crippled his
finances. He was no longer bearing the cost of the
experiments and had not even been able to pay the
expenses of the patent Watt had been forced to
borrow from Black again. He began to be haunted
by the expecta- tion of failure, and with it the ruin of
his life's work. " To-day I entered into the thirty-
fifth year of my life," he wrote in I770 ' and I think I
have hardly done thirty-five pence worth of good in
the world; but I cannot help it." Work on the engine
stopped for want of funds. He was out of pocket
more than the value of his share in the invention. He
even spoke of converting the " damned engine " into
a machine of thee old type and selling it for what it
would fetch. The trade depression and financial
crisis of 1772 finally smashed Roebuck. The
partnership had come to grief, and there was
nothing left to be done but try to save something
out of the wreck. The patent was worthless. The
engine at Kinneil was perishing. Watt had long been
prepared for the failure of his own projects, but he
could not endure the thought that he had helped to
bring ruin on his friend.
"My heart bleeds for his situation, and I can do
nothing to help him. I stuck by him till I have much
hurt myself; I can do so no longer; my family calls
for my care to provide for them."
This letter was written in July 1773. But his cup of
misery was not yet full. Within three months his wife
was dead.
CHAPTER SIX
Matthew Boulton of Soho
" I would not be understood as saying that there is
not what may be called a genius for business, an
extraordinary capacity for affairs, quickness and
comprehension united, an insight into character, an
acquaintance with a number of particular
circumstances, a variety of expedients, a tact for
finding out what will do."ÑHAZLITT.
WATT'S situation was not in reality as desperate as
might appear from the account that has just been
given. For when the crisis came he was not entirely
dependent on Roebuck for support. Among
Roebuck's friends in his Birmingham days was
Matthew Boulton the big hardware manufacturer.
Boulton was not merely a competent scientist and a
keen patron of the arts; he was, without doubt, the
greatest industrial organiser of the century. Roebuck
had tried to persuade him to join him in his
excursions into coal-mining, but Boulton was fully
occupied with his own factory at Birmingham and
had wisely declined. The two men continued good
friends, and when Roebuck heard of Watt's
invention he naturally told Boulton about it, for he
knew that he too had been doing some experiments
on " fire-engines " with a view to introducing them
into his own works. Boulton's interest was at once
aroused, and he invited Watt to come and see him.
In I767 Watt went, but Boulton was away, and it was
his friend, Dr. Small, who showed him over the
factory. Boulton had been for some five years
installed in his magnificent premises at Soho, two
miles north of Birmingham. The inspection of this
most up-to-date of modern factories made a great
impression on Watt. There was a quality about its
ordered efficiency that he had never met with
before. Roebuck and his works seemed crude and
feeble beside this creation of the organiser's genius.
And he was equally delighted with Dr. Small.
Small was a man after Watt's own heart. He t was an
ingenious scientist with a taste for mechanical
invention, and the agility of his mind and the
keenness of his perception enabled him to fathom
Watt's character, to follow, or even to anticipate, his
moods, and to appreciate the quality of his work. He
was quick to understand exactly how much progress
Watt had made, where he was certain and where he
was still guessing, and he was instantly at his side,
viewing the problem from the same angle, and never
needed to be brought laboriously up-to-date. He
fully shared that passion for perfection in design,
that acute sense of beauty in machinery which was
the cause of so much friction between Watt and
those of his colleagues who were out of sympathy
with this side of his character. There is more real
intimacy in his letters than in those of any other of
Watt's correspondents.
Watt came away from Soho with his eyes opened.
He had been given a glimpse of a world that was
new to him, and to which he instinctively felt that he
belonged. But already he was pledged to Roebuck.
He suffered all the torments of a young man who
marries in his own narrow circle and, on passing out
into a wider sphere, sees at once that he has married
too soon. At the same time he was absolutely loyal
to the partner he had chosen. Boulton and Small
were just as eager to capture him as he was to join
them, if he could do so without being unfair to
Roebuck. " Before I knew your connection with Dr.
R.," wrote Small, "my idea was, that you should
settle here, and that Boulton and I should assist you
as much as we could, which in any case we will most
certainly do." The most that Roebuck would
consider, when the case was put to him, was to allow
Boulton a limited share in the business, which would
have put him in the position of an inferior partner,
and would have prevented that close co-operation
between inventor and manufacturer which Boulton
regarded as essential. Boult on very rightly
mistrusted Roebuck's business ability, and, realising
that he was out of sympathy with Watt and did not
understand how to make things easy for him, he
wanted to get the unhappy engineer under his own
protection.
Watt talked over his troubles with his friend,
Professor Jardine, who then went to sound Roebuck
again. The letter in which he reported to Watt the
results of his interview is full of interest. " I waited
to find, without direct inquiry, if he had in any
respect consented to the proposal from the South;
but understand, that the more he is convinced of the
practicability of the scheme, the keener he is of
carrying it to practice yourselves for your mutual
advantage. . . . And, therefore, my opinion is, James,
that you will find it necessary, on account of your
intimate connection, to fall in with his senti
ments...." Then he touched on the point that hurt
Watt most of all. " The very nature of your
improvements is such that it is im possible it can fail
to succeed much to your interest, even though it
should not be carried to such perfection as might be
expected from the gentleman in the South's
assistance." But James was miserable at the prospect
of losing Boulton's help and with it the hope of
perfection, and he pressed Roebuck until he made a
definite offer. It was a very poor one} amounting
only to a share in the engine as regards the three
counties of Warwick, Stafford and Derby.
Boulton's reply to Watt is a masterpiece. The tone is
firm and decisive, suggesting the strong man of
business who knows his own mind and shrinks from
no responsibility, however great. His was the
strength that Watt was craving for to lift the burden
of anxiety from his shoulders. " It would not be
worth my while to make for three counties only; but
I find it very well worth my while to make for all the
world." And Watt knew that it was not an idle boast;
he could do it if he wanted to. At the same time he
showed a subtle appreciation of the causes of Watt's
distress. While professing to be giving his view of
the proper way of running the business, he painted a
picture which was the ideal of Watt's dreams. " My
idea was to settle a manufactory near to my own, by
the side of our canal, where I would erect all the
conveniences necessary for the completion of
engines, and from which manufactory we would
serve all the world with engines of all sizes. By these
means and your assistance we could engage and
instruct some excellent workmen, who . . . could
execute the invention 20 per cent. cheaper than it
would be otherwise executed, and with as great a
differ ence of accuracy as there is between the black
smith and the mathematical-instrument-maker." And
the letter concluded ambiguously, leaving a loophole
for fresh negotiations.
This brilliant piece of business diplomacy had its
effect. Watt never ceased to long for association
with these two men, the quick- witted scientist and
the strong and understanding man of business, who
perceived his wants even before he expressed them.
At the end of September, I769~~ Roebuck,
weakened by his own financial difficulties and Watt's
insistence, made Boulton a new offer. He proposed
to sell him one-third of the rights in the patent for a
sum of not less than a thousand pounds, to be fixed
later. Boulton was to have a year in which to decide
and complete the purchase. The formal proposal
was sent in writing on November 28th, and two days
later Small wrote to Watt, " I have only time to say
that Mr. Boulton and I have agreed with Dr.
Roebuck." To which Watt replied, " I shake hands
with you and Mr. Boulton on our connection, which
I hope will prove agreeable to us all." The immediate
result was that Watt sent drawings of an engine to
Boulton, which he at once began to put into
execution at Soho.
But the price had not been fixed nor the transaction
concluded, and before the year was out Roebuck's
financial distress was so evident that the whole
situation was changed. Boulton and Small had
accepted the offer of partnership, unsatisfactory
though it was, in order to help Watt. But now the
scheme was no longer merely unsatisfactory; it was
rapidly becoming dangerous. The price had been left
to Boulton. This put Watt in a very delicate position,
of which he was acutely sensible, for he could not
ask his friend Boulton to pay a high price for
something he was only buying to please him, nor
could he advise his friend and partner Roebuck,
considering his urgent need of money, to take a low
one. " I admire your delicacy," he wrote to Small, " I
have urged the Doctor to sell, and you to purchase,
perhaps further than I ought to have done. I have
had reasons which I cannot further explain by letter;
when you know them all, I suspect you will acquit
me of selfish designs in teasing you so much." There
was, in fact, so much delicacy on both sides, that no
progress could be made.
The commercial crisis that finally ruined Roebuck
also put Boulton into temporary difficulties, and all
hope of a conclusion vanished. But the solution
came another way. Roebuck went bankrupt, and his
affairs were put into the hands of trustees. This
Boulton had not expected, and at first he was not
certain how to deal with the situation. If Roebuck's
property in the engine had any value, all his creditors
had an equal right to share in it. Boulton was himself
a creditor to a considerable extent, and when he
found that the other creditors considered the engine
to be worthless, he was able, with their consent and
hearty approval, to take over the full property in the
patent in return for a complete renunciation of all
his claims on the estate. Nothing now stood in the
way of a new partner ship between Boulton and
Watt. In May, I774 Watt left Glasgow to join
Boulton at Soho.
Birmingham had been a town of some importance in
the Middle Ages, and was already famous for its
hardware when Leland drew up for his master,
Henry VIII, a full and picturesque account of the
resources, antiquities and curiosities of his kingdom.
In the seventeenth century specialisation went still
further, some branches of the hardware trade
moving to other centres. A traveller, writing in
I690's tells us that those " swords, heads of canes,
snuff-boxes and other fine works of steel," which
can be seen in such perfection in Milan, " can be had
better and cheaper at Birmingham." Its supremacy in
the production of all manner of metal trinkets and
plated goods won for it the name of " the toy shop
of Europe," and inspired a local poet to sing:
" See from the sooty toils what wonders rise !
Behold yon radiant family of toys ! Th' elastic buckle
casts a silver ray, And the gilt button emulates the
day; Here sparkling chains in bright confusion lie,
Chains not to fetter limbs, but grace the thigh."
The very rapid industrial development of
Birmingham was made possible by its freedom from
medieval restrictive customs. The great aim of new
and expanding industries in the early days of the
industrial revolution was to escape from " the
miserable little politics of corporate towns," for the
jealous spirit that had prevented Watt from setting
up his shop in Glasgow was an enemy to all progress
and innovation. But Birmingham had not been
incorporated, and it opened its doors to all. It had
no Gilds, prepared to see the nest empty rather than
run the risk of mothering a cuckoo, and no
champions of religious persecution, heroically
defending their city from the contamination of the
unorthodox. It was ready to welcome new blood
whether it ran in the veins of capitalists or
unapprenticed workmen, of Quakers or Dissenters.
Birmingham ardently embraced the doctrines of
modern commerce. By the middle of the eighteenth
century she enjoyed an unchallenged pre-eminence
in the fabrication of shoddy goods and gimcrack
vulgarities. She tickled the appetite of fashion for "
new- born gawds " and throve by the satisfaction of
its greed. For years she lived by buckles; buckles that
grew more dazzling and more monstrous every
season. But, in I790 the buckle was ousted by " the
effeminate shoe-string," and 20,000 good craftsmen
of Birmingham went hungry. It was an undignified
position for a great city, but she had only herself to
blame. She was suffering the same convulsion of
mind and body that afflicts the East when touched
by western civilisation. In changing her way of life
she rejected the old standards and could find none
to take their place. Quality was sacrificed for the
sake of quantity, and her products lost all permanent
value.
Matthew Boulton set himself steadfastly against the
degrading influences of the day, and he deserves
credit for having proved that quality may be
combined with quantity, and shares with Josiah
Wedgwood the almost unique distinction of having
made the factory the province of the artist. The
toymakers of Birmingham had many tricks to
deceive the inexpert eye of the purchaser, and
palmed off as articles of price much ill-made,
meretricious trash. Against these practices Boulton
never ceased to wage war. ." As I am an old
buttonmaker," he said, " allow me to advise my
brethren to make excellence rather than cheapness
their principle of rivalry." But the struggle still goes
on, and modern man now assumes, with affecting
modesty, that he has lost for ever the faculty,
possessed by his ancestors, of making articles that
are both sound and beautiful, and his ideal home is
fitted, indeed, with every modern convenience, but
beautifully furnished throughout with genuine
antiques.
Boulton inherited a comfortable fortune and a
prosperous business from his father, who died in
l759, but instead of retiring on the proceeds, he
devoted his life to the service of industry. Wishing
for larger premises, he selected a site at Soho, and
there built a factory to accommodate, it is said, over
a thousand workmen. Hither he migrated in I762
and, with no experience to guide him and no one to
turn to for advice, he created by his inventive genius
and his force of character an organisation that was
accepted as a model by all the aspiring captains of
industry of that generation and the next, including
even Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of Etruria. He
was soon one of the best known men in England. In
order to provide himself with designs to copy, he
borrowed the art treasures of the nobility, made
drawings of the exhibits in the British Museum, and
sent agents to ransack the curio shops of Italy. His
work in consequence became fashionable in high
society, and won a reputation throughout Europe.
He had long interviews with the King and Queen,
both of whom gave him several orders. " The king,"
he wrote to his wife, " hath bought a pair of
cassolets, a Titus, a Venus clock, and some other
things, and inquired this morning how yesterday's
sale went. I shall see him again, I believe. I was with
them, the Queen and all the children, between two
and three hours.... The Queen showed me her last
child, which is a beauty." A few years earlier he had
not been considered good enough to marry into one
of the county families. Soho became one of the
sights of the kingdom and was visited by the
crowned heads and nobility of Europe; Boulton won
recognition as the greatest living authority on
matters of industry and trade, and became the
trusted adviser of governments. But it was not only
on account of his business ability and his great
resources that Watt found in Boulton the ideal
associate. Watt needed a sympathetic friend as well
as a partner, and I Boulton's personality fitted him to
fulfil both functions. He was a profound judge of
character, I and understood Watt's longings and
anxieties better than he did himself. He had a deep I
affection for his colleague which increased with
time, and throughout the period of their partner ship
he sustained him with his unselfish devotion. Watt
was often petulant and irritable, chafing under
discomforts that were trivial compared with the
worries that Boulton had voluntarily taken upon
himself in order to relieve his friend's anxieties. But
Boulton's patience never failed, and he watched over
him and cared for him as a nurse watches over a
delicate, nervous child. Boulton was like a
comfortable arm-chair after a long day's walk. His
strength was always there to support you) his
gentleness and sympathy to receive you and protect
you from all the jarring roughnesses of the world.
His massive forehead, strong features, and firm
mouth inspired confid ence, and his eyes invited
confidences. In ingenuity of mind, Watt was his
superior, but Boulton has a place among the great
men of history.
When Watt came to Soho, work began at once. The
old Kinneil engine was brought over in pieces,
finished, and set to pump the water that drove the
water-wheels in the factory. It was familiarly known
as " Beelzebub." In December, I7742 Watt wrote to
his father: "The business I am here about has turned
out rather successful, that is to say, that the fire-
engine I have invented is now going, and answers
much better than any other that has yet been made;
and I expect that the invention will be very
beneficial to me." It was the first decisive success he
had been able to report since the birth of his idea,
nine years before. At the moment, too, the prospects
of finding a market for the engines were good. In
I77I Boulton had heard that four or five copper
mines in Cornwall were about to be abandoned
owing to the cost of the coal consumed by their old
pumping engines, and at the same time he had had
inquiries from a mining company in Derbyshire. But
already there were competitors in the field. Other
engineers were at work, both improving the old
atmospheric engine and producing new models of
their own, and one at least had stolen Watt's ideas.
Boulton realised that he had no sufficient guarantee
that, if he invested his capital in the engine, he
would be able to reap the profits that were his due.
The patent was for fourteen years, and six of these
had passed before he was in a position to execute a
single order. Boulton's first care was to discover how
he could obtain an extension of the period during
which he and Watt might enjoy a monopoly of
manufacture, and at the same time secure a public
confirmation of their rights which would strengthen
their hands in dealing with pirates. He sent Watt up
to London to prospect. Boulton favoured the plan
of surrendering the patent and getting a new one.
This would have allowed him to increase its
effectiveness by patching up any loopholes it might
contain. But Watt reported that every one advised
him to get the existing patent prolonged by Act of
Parliament.
This course was adopted, and a bill was introduced
in February I775; owing to considerable opposition
in the House, it was not passed till the following
May. It recited that, whereas James Watt had carried
out experiments along the lines indicated in his
patent, and whereas heavy expenses had been
incurred and would still have to be incurred before
the public could receive the full benefit of his
valuable invention, so that " the whole term granted
by the said Letters Patent may probably elapse
before the said James Watt can receive an advantage
adequate to his labour and invention," it was enacted
that the sole privilege of making and selling his
engines in Great Britain and her colonies should be
vested in him and his executors for a term of
twentyfive years. Boulton now felt that he could
safely embark on manufacture on an extensive scale.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Creation of the Engine Business at Soho
Behold yon mansion flank'd by crowding trees
Grace the green slope, and court the southern
breeze, Genius and worth with Boulton there reside,
Boulton, of arts the patron and the pride I
Commerce with rev'rence at thy name shall bow,
Thou fam'd creator of the fam'd Soho ! " J.
MORFITT.
WORK was started at once on two engines, one for
Bloomfield Colliery, some fourteen miles out of
Birmingham, and the other for John Wilkinson's
ironworks at Broseley, in the Wrekin district. On the
success of these engines depended the future of the
whole enter prise. The world of industry was
watching anxiously to see whether this new power
would show itself to be a sound investment. Re
membering how he had been hampered in his earlier
experiments by bad workmanship, Watt was in
terror lest some ill-executed part might ruin the
effect of the first public trials. He could trust
Boulton to see that all the more delicate pieces of
mechanism, the valves, controls, con denser and so
forth, which were manufactured at Soho, were made
accurately to his designs, but the heavy iron parts,
and especially the cylinder, had to be cast elsewhere.
When conducting his earlier experiments with Small,
Boulton had got his cylinders from Coalbrookdale,
the famous ironworks belonging to the Darby
family, the originators of the practice of smelting
with coke in place of charcoal. But they did no
better than Carron, and the castings were found to
be " unsound, and totally useless, and done over
with some stuff to conceal their defects."
The situation was saved by John Wilkinson, the
biggest figure in the history of the British iron
industry. Wilkinson, who had inherited his father's
works at Bersham, in Denbighshire, and then started
a new foundry at Broseley, next door to the Darby
works at Coalbrookdale, had a consuming passion
for iron. His vision of the future was a world in
which everything would be constructed of iron. He
made an iron pulpit for his parish church, iron
writing tablets for the village school children, in
which they wrote in sand with an iron pen, and
finally left directions that he was to be buried in an
iron coffin. Shortly before Watt joined Boulton at
Soho Wilkinson had invented a new way of boring
cylinders. In the old method the tools could not be
kept rigid and so, although the diameter of the
cylinder remained constant throughout, the bore did
not proceed from end to end along a straight line.
There was a subtle curve in the walls of the cylinder
which caused the piston to jam. Wilkinson remedied
this defect, and so contributed the last factor needed
to make the manufacture of steam-engines a
commercial possibility.
In these two first engines the small parts were made
at Soho, the big by Wilkinson, and the erection of
the engine was supervised by Watt. When he went to
Broseley, Boulton forbade him to let the engine
make a single stroke until he was certain it would
work without a hitch, " and then, in the name of
God, fall to and do your best." The whole beauty of
the machine must be revealed to the spectators in
one miraculous moment. The stratagem was entirely
successful and the impression created was profound.
The Bloomfield engine was " opened " with great
ceremony in March I776. The trial took place in the
presence of the proprietors of the colliery and, as the
Birmingham Gazette informs us, of " a Number of
Scientific Gentlemen whose Curiosity was excited to
see the first Movements of so singular and so
powerful a Machine; and whose Expectations were
fully gratified by the Excellence of its performance.
The Workmanship of the Whole did not pass
unnoticed, nor unadmired.... The liberal Spirit shown
by the Proprietors of Bloomfield in ordering this,
the first large engine of the Kind that hath ever been
made, and in rejecting a common one which they
had begun to erect, entitle them to the thanks of the
public; for by this Example the Doubts of the
Inexperienced are dispelled, and the Importance and
Usefulness of the Invention is finally decided."
There followed in the same year an engine for a
Warwickshire colliery and another for a distillery at
Stratford-le-Bow.
Watt had been away from Soho a good deal, first in
London about the Act of Parliament, then at
Broseley, setting up the engine, and finally in the
summer of I776 he went to Glasgow to get married.
Boulton corresponded with him regularly, and his
letters give a lively picture of life at the factory. At
first, in the absence of the master mind, progress
was slow. " The engine goes marvellously bad," he
wrote. " It made eight strokes per minute; but upon
Joseph's endeavouring to mend it, it stood still. Nor
do I at present see sufficient cause for its dulness."
Then follow full accounts of the subsequent, and
more successful, experiments. Meanwhile the factory
was growing. " The new forging-shop looks very
formidable; the roof is nearly put on, and the hearths
are both built." As the factory grew, so did his
ambitions. " I have fixed my mind upon making
from twelve to fifteen reciprocating, and fifty
rotative engines per annum. The Empress of Russia
is now at my house, and a charming woman she is."
Of Watt's second marriage we are told by his
biographer that, " having found that the burden of
domestic affairs and the care of his children
interfered seriously with his other pursuits, which
had now become vitally important, he, after having
remained for some years a widower, married a
second time." It sounds a calculating and
unromantic affair, and certainly Anne Macgregor,
who became the second Mrs. Watt, appears as an
obscure and somewhat sinister background, rather
than as a leading actress, in the scenes of his later
life. Her father consented to the match, but wished
to know the value of his son-in-law's share in the
engine business. Apparently no formal deed of
partnership had been drawn up, but, at Watt's
request, Boulton prepared a statement containing
the various points on which they had agreed, which
he " extracted from our mutual missives." It
amounted to this. Boulton held two-thirds of the
property in the patent, and undertook to pay all
expenses of past and future experiments, without
claiming interest on his money. He was to provide
all the capital for the business of manufacture, and
on this to receive lawful interest. The profits were to
be divided in the proportions of two-thirds to him
and onethird to Watt. Watt was to make all the
drawings and to give directions for the work of
construction.
During the next five years the attention of the firm
was almost entirely occupied with the demands of
the Cornish mines. This district seemed to offer the
most favourable conditions for expansion. Inquiries
from factories were usually for a " rotary " engine,
one that would drive a wheel; but Soho was at
present only producing " reciprocating "
enginesÑengines that worked a vertical rod up and
down, and were suitable for application to pumps
and bellows. Factory owners were therefore told that
the rotary engine was not yet perfected, and were
advised to use a water-wheel, supplying it with water
by means of a reciprocating engine and a pump. This
was naturally put out of court as an unsound
investment if a rotary engine was likely to be soon
on the market. So there was not much business to
be done in factories. The engine was effective for
blowing furnaces, but the majority of ironworks still
used charcoal, and therefore did not require a
powerful blast. There were one or two city
waterworks where an engine might be used, but this
demand was almost confined to the London area.
There remained only the pumping of mines. It might
be expected that the engine would be most useful in
the coalmines, since fuel was to be had on the spot
for nothing. In reality, that is precisely the reason
why the engines were not first introduced there. The
most obvious advantage of Watt's engine over
Newcomen's was its saving of coal. Where coal was
very cheap that saving was not enough to
compensate for the expense of in stalling the new
machine. In addition to this, the majority of the
coal-mines were not in urgent need of a more
powerful engine. The coal area was extensive, and
the immense increase in demand, produced largely
by the spread of the engine itself, which was to drive
the miners to burrow ever more deeply into the
bowels of the earth, had as yet hardly begun. An old-
fashioned atmospheric engine was good enough to
drain the shallower workings.
In Cornwall the case was different. The rich mining
district round Redruth had long been honeycombed
with diggings, and there was hardly an acre that had
not been tried for ore. " The spot we are at," wrote
Mrs. Watt, when staying with her husband at
Chacewater, " is the most disagreeable in the whole
county. The face of the earth is broken up in ten
thousand heaps of rubbish, and there is scarce a tree
to be seen." The surface deposits of tin had been
exhausted and copper was found only at a
considerable depth. If the industry was to expand, it
could only expand downwards. Deeper and deeper
worked the miners, fighting the water as they went.
At times the pits were drowned and had to be
abandoned. Then Newcomen's pumpingengine gave
them a new lease of life. But the water was getting
too strong for it, and more than once of late it had
failed to " fork " a flooded mine. Two engines might
succeed where one I20 failed, but the cost of
transporting coal by sea to Cornwall and then inland
to the mines was prohibitive. As trade declined and
profits fell, the miners clamoured for more power
and less expenditure of fuel. This was exactly what
the new engine professed to be able to give.
The first definite order came from Ting-Tang Mine
in November, I776 and it was at once followed by
another from Wheal Busy, near Chacewater. The
parts of the Chacewater engine were the first to be
ready, and Watt went down to Cornwall to see them
put together. He was not very well received. The
building and repairing of steam-engines had been a
regular business there for a long time, and there
were families which had been in the trade for two
generations. If the newcomer from Glasgow was
successful, their livelihood would be threatened. But
they were not very frightened. They found it hard to
believe that any one could know more about steam-
engines than they did, who had handled them all
their lives. The most prominent of them was
Jonathan Hornblower, son of Joseph who had come
to Cornwall to build engines fifty years ago. Watt
found him pleasant and honest enough, but entirely
sceptical about the value of the new invention. It
was Jonathan's son, Jabez (they all began with a J.
His brothers were called Jesse and Jethro), who was
destined to give so much trouble in after years.
There was also a clever mechanic called Bonze, who
absolutely refused to touch any work connected with
Watt's engine. Watt found the Cornishmen ill-
natured and treacherous. " Certainly," he said, " they
have the most ungracious manners of any people I
have ever yet been amongst." They tried to injure
him by spreading false rumours. " I have already
been accused of making several speeches at Wheal
Virgin, where, to the best of my memory, I have
only talked about eating, drinking, and the weather."
When the Chacewater engine was ready, great
crowds came to see it start, many of them hoping
for a fiasco. But the trial was an overwhelming
success. It did more work than a common engine,
and with one-third of the coal. " The velocity,
violence, magnitude, and horrible noise of the
engine," wrote Watt, "give universal satisfaction to
all beholders, believers or not. I have once or twice
trimmed the engine to end its stroke gently, and to
make less noise; but Mr. Wilson [the manager]
cannot sleep unless it seems quite furious, so I have
left it to the enginemen; and, by the by, the noise
seems to convey great ideas of its power to the
ignorant, who seem to be no more taken with
modest merit in an engine than in a man."
The Wheal Busy engine made as many converts as a
Methodist meeting and inspired them with as great a
fever of enthusiasm. Soho was hard put to it to keep
pace with the orders. In December I778Watt wrote
from Redruth to his old friend Black: " Our success
here has equalled our most sanguine expectations;
we have succeeded in saving three-fourths of the
fuel over the engines here, which are the best of the
old kind in the island.
"A universal confidence of the whole county in the
abilities of the engine is now fully established, and
we have executed agreements for several others, one
of which will pay us better still, and is also to do the
work of two other engines larger than itself. Several
mines, formerly abandoned, are likely to go to work
again through virtue of our engines; we have five
engines of various sizes actually going here now in
this county, and have eight more in contemplation,
so that our affairs wear a most smiling aspect to
human eyes.
" Our affairs in other parts of England go on very
well; but no part can or will pay us so well as
Cornwall, and we have luckily come among them
when they were almost at their wits' end how to go
deeper with their mines."
But Watt was, for a change, unduly optimistic. There
were still many obstacles in the path. Labour
continued to be a difficulty. The policy adopted at
Soho was one of specialisation. Each workman
confined himself to one process until he became an
expert at it. " We are systematising the business of
engine-making," wrote Boulton to Smeaton in
I778~~ as as we have done before in the button
manufactory; we are training up workmen, and
making tools and machines to form the different
parts of Mr. Watt's engines with more accuracy, and
at a cheaper rate than can possibly be done by the
ordinary methods of working. Our workshop and
apparatus will be of sufficient extent to execute all
the engines that are likely to be soon wanted in this
country." But it was a slow business, and rich in
disappointments. Some men were untrainable;
others, when trained, were enticed away by other
employers with offers of higher pay. Perfection of
workmanship was not achieved at once, and many
of the parts continued to be manufactured by other
firms.
When the parts were finished, the engine had to be
put together on the spot. This also required skilled
labour, and there was very little of it. Men could not
be kept in the employ of the firm for this type of
work; they had to be found when wanted. Watt
complained that it was not at all easy to discover "
operative engineers, who can put engines together
according to plan as clockmakers do clocks." On
another occasion he was searching for " forty pair of
Smiths " to set up the engine at Wheal Virgin, and
searching in vain, " for in all the mines where we are
concerned I find a scarcity of these animals."
Far scarcer still were men capable of superintending
the installation of an engine, teaching the local
engineers how to treat it, and setting it right when
their clumsy handling had upset its delicate
constitution. Watt had at first to do the bulk of this
work himself, and he had a hectic time flying
backwards and forwards from the factory to the
various centres where operations were in progress.
Soon Boulton provided him with a small staff of
men to relieve him of the strain, who acted under his
minute instructions. But they made mistakes. Watt
was the sort of man who could not forgive a
mistake, and he wrote fierce letters to Boulton
demanding their instant dismissal. Boulton quietly
shifted them on to other jobs till the air cleared, and
sent Joseph, the Soho foreman, down to Cornwall.
But even Joseph had his little weaknesses, and
another querulous letter arrived from Watt. " Joseph
has pursued his old practice of drinking in a
scandalous manner, until the very enginemen turned
him into ridicule.... I have not heard how he behaved
in the west; excepting that he gave the ale there a
bad character." But Joseph was a good workman and
much could be forgiven him. Besides, as Watt
reported, " A1though Joseph has attended to his
drinking, he has done much good at his leisure
hours," and he soon had the engines in proper
order.
Joseph had an even more remarkable successor in
William Murdock, who entered the service of the
firm in I777. He was a big brawny Scot, of immense
industry and dog-like devotion to his employers. He
was endowed with originality of mind as well as
dexterity of hand, and on his first appearance in
Cornwall in I779 he at once won his way to Watt's
heart. He then performed the more remarkable feat
of winning the affection of the Cornish miners.
Whenever anything went wrong with an engine the
miners asked for William, and were manifestly
disappointed if Watt came instead. The mineowners
offered him £Iooo a year if he would stay with
them, engineers asked him to go into partnership
with them, but he stuck to the firm in which he was
an employee at twenty shillings a week. He was the
maker of the first working model of a steam
locomotive ever seen in this country, he invented gas
lighting and made valuable contributions to the
design of the steam-engine. But he never allowed his
own researches to interfere with his duty to his
employers. He lived on terms of close friendship
with Boulton and Watt, but was not put on the
footing of a partner until the business had passed to
their sons.
In spite of the rapidity of the progress he was
making, Boulton's financial position was causing him
much anxiety. His outlay had been enormous, and
his income was very precarious. When the engines
were new and still had to prove their worth, he was
obliged to supply them on very easy terms. Very few
firms were sanguine enough, or rich enough, when
buying an engine, to pay down a sum that would
cover the cost of production, compensate for the
outlay on experiment and provide Watt with a fair
reward for his invention. Boulton therefore adopted
the following plan. Customers paid for the parts of
the engine, some of which were made at Soho others
elsewhere, and for the work of installation and the
patentees secured a return on the value of the
invention by charging a rent for the use of the
engine so long as the exclusive privileges of the
patent lasted. This scheme had occurred to him as
early as the spring of I775 and he had tentatively
suggested to the proprietors of the Cornish mines,
who were asking about terms, that he would
guarantee that his engines would save half the fuel
used by the old engines, provided that they paid him
a sum equal to the value of what it saved beyond
that half. The proposal to fix his rent according to
the economy in fuel was very ingenious. It was
distinctly favourable to purchasers, as, once they had
met the initial cost of manufacture, they were given a
guarantee that the engine would yield them an
annual profit. They could not possibly be out of
pocket by it. The risk was not on their shoulders.
And it was fairly satisfactory for Boulton. It enabled
him to sell more engines than he could in any other
way have done, and it gave him the best chance of
getting the money that was due to him. He obtained
a share in that increasing prosperity which he was
confident that his engines would bring to industry.
When business actually began, the form of
agreement adopted was slightly different from that
first sketched by Boulton. The engine was built and
erected at the expense of the purchasers, and they
then undertook to pay annually a sum equal to one-
third of the value of the fuel saved by the engine as
compared with a common engine. Watt invented an
ingenious meter, which was kept under lock and key,
and told him faithfully what that saving was. The
whole affair is so clearly described in a letter of
Boulton to the Carron Ironworks, when erecting an
engine there, that it is worth quoting at some length.
"We do not aim at profits in engine building," writes
Boulton, " but shall take our profits out of the
saving of fuel; so that if we save nothing we shall
take nothing. Our terms are as follows: we will make
all the necessary plans, sections and elevations for
the building, and for the engine with its
appurtenances, specifying all cast and forged
ironwork, and every other particular relative to the
engine. We will give all necessary directions to your
workmen, which they must implicitly obey. We will
execute, for a stipulated price, the valves, and all
other parts which may require exact execution, at
Soho; we will see that all the parts are put together,
and set to work properly."
Then follows the usual stipulation that the fuel
consumed is to be compared with that of any other
engine in Scotland, and one-third of the value of the
saving is to be paid to Boulton and Watt " in
recompense for our patent licence, our drawings,
etc." If the engine is sold, the new owner must
undertake to continue the payment of the dues
owing, " otherwise the engine which we make for
you at an expense of two thousand pounds may be
sold in Cornwall for ten thousand pounds."
The disadvantages of this system are evident. Like all
systems of payment by instalments it exposes the
seller to continuous risk. The purchaser may at any
time become unable or unwilling to pay what is
owing. In most cases of the kind, if the buyer gets in
default for any reason, the seller can at least recover
the goods. In Boulton's case that was not so. In the
first place, if a copper mine failed and had to close
down, the payments would stop; but there would be
no default. When the engine is not working it cannot
save coal, and no rent is due. In the second place,
even if there were deliberate default he had no easy
remedy, for the engine was the property of the mine;
it had been bought and paid for. Boulton could not
go down and take it away.
The longer an engine had been at work in a mine,
the more it was looked on by the mineowners as
their absolute property, and the more intolerable
appeared to them the burden of the annual dues.
They forgot that, apart from these, Boulton and
Watt had received nothing to reward them for their
risks, their original outlay, and for the invention
itself, and they came to regard the payment as an
iniquitous tax, levied on them for the use of their
own property in order to keep two grasping
monopolists in idleness. It was a toll taken by private
individuals on the mineral resources of the country.
Feeling ran high. It was augmented by the fact that
the monopoly, which normally only lasted for
fourteen years, had been extended by Act of
Parliament for twenty-five. The miners felt
convinced that somebody had sold them. They
proposed to petition Parliament to repeal the Act.
Watt was miserable. He had devoted his life to
benefit his fellow-men, and now he was denounced
as a heartless profiteer and an enemy of society. He
felt inclined to sell the whole business for what it
would fetch and retire to poverty and peace. But the
storm blew over.
The income from the engines, therefore, was bound
to be very precarious. It was difficult to extract, and
it depended entirely on the prosperity of the copper-
mining industry. Unfortunately that industry was
passing through a severe depression. The flooding of
the mines and the high cost of coal had nearly
ruined many of the companies, and, although there
was every reason to hope that the new engine would
retrieve their fortunes, the mine-owners were
extremely reluctant to put their hands in their
pockets until those pockets were once more
comfortably full. Boulton was inclined to be lenient,
and to accept orders without concluding any definite
agreement about future payments, but this infuriated
Watt. To him a bird in the hand was worth at least a
dozen in the bush; it was quite enough for his
modest tastes, and it saved worry. "Let our terms be
moderate," he wrote to Boulton, " and, if possible,
consolidated into money a priori, and it is certain we
shall get some money, enough to keep us out of
jailÑin continual apprehension of which I live at
present." Boulton did his best; but even when he
had concluded firm agreements he often had to
remit the dues for several months, because the
companies were too poor to pay.
Things came to such a pass that Boulton and his
friends had to take shares in several of the copper
mines in order to keep them going at all; he had to
finance his customers to enable them to pay for his
goods. This he could ill afford to do. He was himself
in debt. The hardware business, which was run as a
separate concern, was doing badly, chiefly owing to
the incompetence of his partner, Fothergill. He
could get no assistance there. In I778 Low, Vere &
Co., the bankers from whom he had been
borrowing, nearly came to grief, and they naturally
called on Boulton for repayment. He only saved
himself by borrowing another £7¡¡¡ from a Mr. Wiss,
pledging the profits of the engines to pay the
interest. Wiss insisted on Watt's name appearing in
the agreement, as, without him, the mortgage on the
engines was unsound. Watt was furious. The terms
of partnership had exempted him from all financial
responsibility. He practically accused Boulton of
breaking their agreement, forgetting that Boulton
had for four years been paying him a salary of £33 a
year, which was outside the bond.
Though driven almost to distraction, Boulton kept
his temper. He asked all who had dealings with the
firm to be gentle with Watt and remember that he
was a sick man. In truth, Watt was hardly
responsible for his actions. He had been reduced to
a state of moaning melancholy. His wife wrote to
Boulton begging him to forgive her husband's
complaining words, and imploring him to do
something to set his mind at rest. " Believe me," she
wrote, " there is not on earth a person who is dearer
to him than you are. It causes him pain to give you
trouble.... In his present state of weakness, every ill,
however trifling, appears of a gigantic size, while, on
the other hand, every good is diminished." But
Boulton was ill too, and at times bitter thoughts
crept into his mind and found expression in his
letters. He was writing to his bankers about the loan
to them. " I have received," he said, " so much pain
from Mr. Watt's repeated ungenerous behaviour to
me on that account, that I am determined as soon as
possible to wipe away all obligation to him." In a
moment of irritation he told Watt that, if he was
dissatisfied, he might take over the management of
the firm's accounts himself. This Watt foolishly
agreed to do.
Money and megrims came near to snapping the
strands of their friendship. But before disaster
overtook them the tide of misfortune turned. In I78I
there had not been " money to pay their Xmas
balances nor their workmen's wages." In the
following year Watt reported a clear income from
engines of over £3¡¡¡- In I783 Boulton had a balance,
and at once used it to release Watt from his debt to
the bankers. Two years later Watt no longer had to
draw an annual salary of £33¡; his share of the
profits had for the first time become a reality.
Twenty years had passed since Watt conceived the
idea of his engine, forty thousand pounds had been
invested by Boulton in the development of the
invention, and at last they were beginning to reap
the fruits of their labours.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Triumph of Boulton and Watt
" Pasta. The ships of the English swarm like flies;
their printed calicoes cover the whole earth, and by
the side of their swords the blades of Damascus are
blades of grass. All India is but an item in the
Ledger-books of the Merchants, whose lumber-
rooms are filled with ancient thrones ! whirr ! whirr I
all by wheels !Ñwhiz ! whiz I all by steam !
"ÑKINGLAXEX Eothen.
THERE could be no doubt left in the mind l of the
public by I780 as to the immense value of the new
steam-engine, at least in so far as the pumping of
water was concerned. With a healthy hum of
smooth-running machinery it sailed through tasks
before which the old engines would have collapsed
with a sob. A useful comparison can be made on the
basis of the proportion between the work done and
the fuel consumed. This can be measured by the
number of pounds weight raised one foot by the
consumption of a bushel of coal, and it is known as
the " duty " of the engine. Smeaton estimated that
the average duty of the atmospheric engines in the
Newcastle district in I769 was just over 5+ millions,
and the maximum then realised was Just under
Watt's first engines, of the I776 model, got up to 21
millions, and by I780 he had increased this to 26.
Boulton was not exaggerating when he claimed that
the efficiency of the steam-engine had been
increased fourfold since Watt took out his patent.
The reciprocating engine was now good enough to
satisfy even Watt's fastidious taste. It was time to
pass on to other problems. When Boulton first
contemplated the idea of manufacturing engines, it
was the rotary, or rotative, type that interested him
most. As the owner of a factory, he could appreciate
the possibilities of steampower for the driving of
factory machinery. Watt, on the contrary, having
started work on the reciprocating engine for
pumping water, had consistently refused to be
diverted on to other lines of experiment. The
engineer's love of mechanical perfection, and the
Scotsman's longing for a secure, if modest, income
combined to make him stick to his chosen task until
it was both a technical and commercial success.
When the bitter struggle was nearly over and the end
seemed to be in sight, his reluctance to embark on
new projects increased. He was in terror lest he
might have to face the same heart-breaking anxieties
all over again, and, by dividing his attention, might
even lose the advantages he had already gained.
Besides, he was distinctly sceptical about the
prospects of finding a market for rotatives. Up till
now he had been selling good engines to people who
were already using bad ones, and for whom the
change was an urgent necessity; with rotatives it
would be a matter of persuading people to buy who
had never used an engine before, and who were
getting on quite well without one.
It is easy to condemn Watt for lack of enterprise and
to criticise him for failing to realise the almost
unlimited scope for the application of steam-power
to the factory. But in Watt's days the factory was
itself a rarity. Soho was unique until Wedgwood built
Etruria in I770. There had, of course, been water-
mills for centuries for grinding corn, and, if you
knew where to look, you could find fullingmills, silk-
mills, and even paper-mills as well. Big distilleries
had been built to satisfy the abnormal passion of the
day for spirits, and there were a few big breweries,
sugar refineries and glass factories, some of which
were suited to the application of power. But Watt
did not anticipate getting anything very startling out
of them; and he was right. In the twenty-five years
of the partnership they only accounted for about
one-tenth of the engines sold.
Watt looked to mining and metallurgy for his
principal market, with some assistance from canals
and waterworks. The iron industry had been one of
the earliest customers. The first engine to start
working outside Soho was erected to blow the
furnaces at Broseley. And it was obvious that, since
the introduction of coal fuel, the iron industry was
making very rapid progress. A modern observer
might consider that any firm ought to be satisfied at
the prospect of enjoying a monopoly in the supply
of power to all the industries that work in iron and
steel. But before passing judgment, he must try to
imagine a world in which steel was counted among
the precious metals, in which all ships were built of
wood and all bridges of wood or stone; in which the
vision of an age when machines should be made of
iron by machines made of ironÑand so back to the
first Adam of machineryÑand all should be driven
by power, would have been reckoned not merely
among the Nightmares, but among the Revelations.
When Watt came to Soho, our total output of pig-
iron was only about 50,ooo tons a year. A century
later it was 7+ millions. The prophets of those days
were expecting rapid development; but even the
most sanguine prophets, when trying to estimate
human progress, hesitate to employ the I50 times
table. However, the outlook here and in the mining
areas was distinctly encouraging, and even though a
great part of the work could be done by
reciprocating engines, there would be a demand for
some rotatives to drive rolling and slitting mills,
polishing machines and tilt hammers, and to run the
winding gear at the pits.
What was in fact to be the scene of the greatest and
most immediate triumph of his engine Watt, in
I780} could not foresee. If any one had then told
him that, of the 325 engines destined to be produced
between I775 and I800~~ II4 would go to the
textile industries, and 92 of those into cotton mills,
he would have been entirely incredulous. For
centuries the manufacture of woollen cloth had been
carried on in the homes of the weavers and spinners.
Nobody could expect any sudden change there, for
habits strike deep roots in four hundred years. The
excitement about cotton seemed to be merely silly,
reminiscent, somewhat, of the activities of the
Projectors in the seventeenth century. It was well
known that for a long time cotton had been spun
into thread and mixed with linen, wool, or silk, to
make a variety of fabrics, and that this industry had
brought prosperity to a considerable district in
Lancashire. But nobody made pure cotton goods.
The use of printed cottons was prohibited early in
the eighteenth century, because they were all
imported from India, and they injured the native
woollen industry.
Then, in the very year in which Watt took out his
first patent, Arkwright patented his machine for
spinning with rollers. This was the first machine that
could spin thread strong enough to allow the
manufacture of fabrics of cotton only. The way was
opened to a new industry with the prospect of
fabulous profits for those first in the field. The
invention was important for another I38 reason.
Machines for roller-spinning can very easily, and
most advantageously, be driven by power. A horse
was the particular form of power Arkwright had in
mind, but he soon replaced it by a water-wheel. The
water-wheel brought the spinning- mill. But
Arkwright's machine alone did not transform the
cotton industry. The decisive step came still later
with the invention of the " Mule " and of its cousin,
the " Billy," which came into use about I780X and
these also were suited to the application of power.
Up till now Arkwright's iniquitous patent for a
process he had not really invented had cast rather a
shadow over the industry. No one was supposed to
use a spinning machine that contained rollers unless
they paid him for the privilege, and rollers were used
in the " Mule." But the remarkable success of
Arkwright himself, and of those to whom he sold a
licence to set up his machinery, proved too
tempting, and in the eighties his rights were
constantly being invaded. He tried to prosecute the
offenders, but action at law only revealed the
weakness of his case, and in I785 his patent was
finally quashed. This year marks the beginning of the
real boom in the cotton industry.
The cautious mind of Watt was scornfully distrustful
of this reckless behaviour. The bubble was being
over-inflated and would surely burst. He had no
intention of being involved in the calamity. He
wrote to Boulton, who had gone to Ireland on
patent business: " If you come home by way of
Manchester, please not to seek for orders for cotton-
mill engines, because I hear that there are so many
mills erecting on powerful streams in the north of
England, that the trade must soon be overdone, and
consequently our labour may be lost." How could
such a trade hope to have a future ? There was not
in history an example of an industry of first-rate
importance being established in a country which
could not produce a single ounce of the necessary
raw material. The thing was unthinkable. It is true
that in those days the raw cotton came from our
possessions in the West Indies; but if it had
continued to do so, and if we had been afraid to
become dependent on the supplies grown in the
United States, our manufacture of cottons would
never have rivalled in importance our manufacture
of woollens. Watt can be excused for looking
askance at this monstrosity. He was watching the
beginning of a new chapter in the economic history
of the world.
Watt had but little conception of the great future
that was in store for his invention. Even Boulton,
who was quicker to grasp the significance of the
movements of commerce, so far underestimated the
coming demand for steamengines, that he imagined
that the factory at Soho would be equal to satisfying,
for many years to come, the needs of the whole
world. But Boulton was fully alive to the importance
of getting a rotary engine put on the market as soon
as possible, even if its use were to be confined to
mills that were already employing water-power to
drive their machinery, and he persuaded Watt to
concentrate his attention on this problem.
Watt had only been deterred by his misguided ideas
as to what would be profitable; all his scientific
instincts urged him to explore every mechanical
variation of the steam-engine. He had from the very
first noted this in his mind as a problem that must
some day be solved, and the moment he went
seriously to work at it he became completely
absorbed. The work of invention was infinitely more
congenial to him than the duties of prospector and
commercial traveller which he was often called on to
perform.
In his original patent of I769 Watt had included a
device for obtaining a rotary motion which he
generally referred to as a " steam- wheel." The wheel
was hollow, and was driven round by the direct
action of the steam passing within it. Nothing much
had come of this idea, but both he and Boulton had
played with it at intervals ever since. While he was
thinking out the designs for his original steam-wheel,
Watt had seen at a colliery an engine, in which the
vertical motion of the rod attached to the beam was
converted by a system of cogs into a rotary motion
to drive a wheel. The engine was of the ordinary
reciprocating type, and as it was only the upward
stroke of the rod that had any driving force, the
motion given to the wheel was very irregular. The
machine was too clumsy to have any interest for
Watt.
Some years later he saw a very similar engine, built
by a certain Matthew Wasborough to drive a rolling-
mill at Birmingham, but it had been greatly
improved by the addition of a flywheel. Now
Wasborough was a quite inferior engineer, and the
spectacle of his apparent success wounded Watt's
vanity. He was convinced that he could make a
better rotary engine than Wasborough. He
determined to get the circular motion by means of
the common crank, and to make the motion regular
by constructing an engine with two cylinders acting
on two cranks attached to one axis. In this way,
whenever one crank was idle, the motion was being
communicated through the other. On these lines he
made a model, and, as he tells us, he " employed a
blackguard of the name of Cartwright (who was
afterwards hanged), about this model," who went off
and gave a full account of it to a large gathering in a
public inn. Whereupon one of his audience hurried
up to London, took out a patent for the use of the
crank to obtain a rotary motion, and concluded an
agreement with Wasborough for its application to
his engine.
Watt was infuriated by this piece of treachery. It had
never occurred to him that any one could claim to
patent the crank, for, as he said to his son, " the true
inventor of the crank rotative motion was the man
(who unfortunately has not been deified) that first
contrived the common foot-lathe." Defeat at the
hands of so contemptible a rival made him bitter. "
If the King should think Matt. Wasborough a better
engineer than me, I should scorn to undeceive him; I
should leave that to Matthew. The conviction would
be the stronger, as the evidence would be
undeniable! "
If he had challenged the patent, he could almost
certainly have overthrown it, but he was afraid to
create a precedent for the annihilation of patent
rights for fear that he himself might be the next
victim. He was forbidden to use the crank; very well,
he would do without it. He sat down and drew up
plans of five alternative ways of adapting a steam-
engine to drive a wheel, and sent them to Boulton. "
I send you enclosed," he wrote, " three yards of the
specification, and have about one yard more to send,
which is the explanation of the drawings.... I have
thought on some other methods by which rotative
motions may be made, but they are inferior to those
specified, and I feared the specification would have
grown four yards long."
He patented the lot in I78IX but only one of them
was ever used, and that only until the lapsing of his
rival's patent set him free to adopt the crank. It was
known as the " Sun and Planet " motion, and it has
been asserted that it was originally invented by
William Murdock; but Watt claimed it as an old idea
of his own, " revived and executed by Mr. M." One
cogwheel is fixed to the end of the driving-rod, and
works into another, attached to the axle of the wheel
to be driven, in such a way that it makes two
revolutions for every stroke of the engine.
Watt now got into his stride, and the flow of his
ideas inundated many more yards of specification
paper. It was at this point that he brought to
perfection and patented, in I782) the doubleacting
engine already described. It was especially suited to
rotative engines, as its double stroke, upwards and
downwards, solved the problem of continuous
motion that had baffled Wasborough. It was a
complicated machine, and therefore more liable to
accidents, but workmanship was improving, and so
also was the skill of the mechanics who were set to
tend the engines.
The double-acting engine in its turn gave rise to a
new problem. In all engines of this period, the rod
of the piston was attached to the end of a beam,
pivoted at its centre. The piston rod must move in a
vertical straight line. If it does not, it will strain the
joint where it enters the cylinder and let the steam
escape. But the end of the beam moves in a curve.
So long as the piston had only to pull on the beam,
it could be attached by a flexible chain. But in the
doubleacting engine it had to push as well. There
must be some rigid connection which would not
wrench the piston out of the straight.
Watt's solution of this tricky little problem by means
of the famous " Parallel Motion," which was
patented in I7842 iSX for his biographer, the most
tantalising event in his life. It is the most beautiful
and fascinating of his inventions, and is quite
indescribable on paper, even with the help of a
diagram. A parallelogram of jointed rods is fixed on
the under side of the beam, and one angle is
fastened to the head of the pistonrod. The whole
contraption is carried through the curve described
by the end of the beam, but, as it goes, its joints,
obedient to the mysterious laws of geometry,
perform a delicious, sinuous wriggle, and the angle
fastened to the rod beats boldly up and down along
a perfect vertical. Many tongues have sung the
praises of this " beautiful invention." His
contemporaries said that " Mr. Watt's Parallel
Motion alone will immortalise his name as a
mechanic." Its charm was universal, and the
following account by an eminent engineer seems to
have hit on the true explanation. " It is indeed
impossible," he writes, " even for an eye
unaccustomed to view mechanical combinations, to
behold the beam of a steamengine moving the
pistons, through the instrumentality of the parallel
motion, without an instinctive feeling of pleasure at
the unexpected fulfilment of an end by means
having so little apparent connection with it." It was,
in fact, as inexplicable, as inconsequent, as
spontaneous, as the works of Nature, and Watt felt a
thrill of pride as he watched this creation of his
genius moving in a mysterious way its wonders to
perform. " Though I am not over anxious after
fame," he wrote, " yet I am more proud of the
parallel motion than of any other mechanical
invention I have ever made."
The translation of these ideas from his brain to
paper, and their embodiment in matter, involved
much patient and often tiresome labour. The painful
contrast between the swiftness of the conception
and the slowness of the realisation brought on fresh
bouts of irritable depression. " These rotatives," he
said, " have taken up all my time and attention for
months, so that I can scarcely say that I have done
anything that can be called business. Our accounts
lie miserably confused." He employed a man named
Playfair to make the drawings, but they were so bad
that he could not use them. "Therefore I fear I must
draw the whole over myself, which, in my present
state of health, and hurried as I am, is dreadful to
me." He started to do it, but suffered such pain in
his head and back that he nearly gave up the task.
But his will to work overcame the temptation to
surrender, and ten days later he wrote, " I have got
one copy of the specification drawing finished in an
elegant manner upon vellum, being the neatest
drawing I ever made."
But while confident that he could solve the technical
problems of the rotative engine, he continued to
have doubts as to its commercial value. It is possible
to trace his gradual conversion. " I have a very mean
opinion of the rotative's profits," he wrote in
January I782~~ " and the trouble with each of them
must be at least double that of an engine that raises
water. Peace of mind, and delivery from Cornwall, is
my prayer." In November of the same year we find
him writing, " There is now no doubt but that fire-
engines will drive mills, but I entertain some doubts
whether anything is to be got by them." Two years
later his tone had changed. " Our rotative engines,"
he writes, " are certainly very applicable to the
driving of cotton mills, in every case where the
conveniency of placing the mill in a town, or ready-
built manufactory, will compensate for the expense
of coals and of our premium." By I 786. the designs
were completed, the double-acting rotary engine was
aproved success, and orders were pouring in so fast
that it was almost impossible to find men enough to
execute them.
The capacity of this new market for engines was
almost inexhaustible, and the partners knew that
henceforth they would receive as many orders for
machines as they chose to undertake. And their
customers were no longer, like the copper miners, a
crew of beaten, broken adventurers, searching
desperately for some means of checking the rot in
their fortunes; they were a company of healthy,
vigorous pioneers borne on the rising tide of a new
prosperity. In this prosperity Boulton and Watt
could claim a share. They were now at the height of
their fame. The industries of England competed for
the favour of their attention.
Watt had the honour of explaining one of his
engines to George III at Whitbread's brewery " His
Majesty," he says, " was much pleased with the
brew-house, which is immense." Shortly afterwards
he visited the King at Windsor, and was obliged to
answer the intelligent questions that royalty is
accustomed to ask about the activities of its subjects.
In I786 Boulton and Watt proceeded to Paris, at the
invitation of the French Government, to consider
the erection of a steam-engine to take the place of
the famous and prodigious machine of Marly, built
in I682 to raise water to supply the town and the
water- works of Versailles. Nothing came of the
proposal, but they thoroughly enjoyed their visit.
The official reception was magnificent. It was the
first time Watt had been treated as a " distinguished
foreigner," and he was much flattered. He was "
drunk from morning to night with Burgundy and
undeserved praise," or so at least he says. But most
gratifying of all was the welcome given him by the
leading scientists of France, who treated him as an
honoured colleague and flocked to hold conference
with him.
Even in this time of apparent triumph Watt's letters
are full of lamentation. It is not unnatural. Owing to
his constitution, work of any kind was a strain, and
always produced a nervous reaction; but whereas
work at his scientific experiments gave him a kind of
nervous exaltation, anything of the nature of
business worries or responsibilities brought on a
condition of nervous exhaustion. In I782 Boulton
had handed over to him the management of the
firm's accounts, and since that date Boulton had
been more and more in the habit of going off on his
own affairs, leaving the full responsibility for the
direction of the business on Watt's shoulders.
Expansion was at this time very rapid, and the
burden was more than Watt could bear. He groaned
under its weight, and sighed for the rest that only
retirement could bring.
" I should have written to you long ago," he writes
on July I8th, I786 but have really been in a worse
situation in some respects this spring than I have
ever been in my life. The illness I was seized with in
London, in the spring, greatly weakened me both in
body and mind.... The bodily disease has in great
measure subsided; but an unusual quantity of
business, which by Mr. Boulton's frequent and long
absences has fallen wholly on me, and several
vexations, with the consequent anxious thoughts,
have hitherto prevented my mind from recovering
its energy. I have been quite effete and listless,
neither daring to face business, nor capable of it; my
head and memory failing me much; my stable of
hobbyhorses pulled down, and the horses given to
the dogs for carrion. I have had serious thoughts of
throwing down the burthen I find myself unable to
carry, and perhaps, if other sentiments had not been
stronger, should have thought of throwing off the
mortal coil; but, if matters do not grow worse, I may
perhaps stagger on. Solomon said that in the
increase of knowledge there is increase of sorrow: if
he had substituted business for knowledge, it would
have been perfectly true.
Matters were made worse by the fact that, at this
moment, Boulton was facing a financial crisis,
perhaps the most serious of his life. The engine
business was doing well, Watt for the first time was
free from debt and had a comfort able balance at the
bank. But Boulton was deeply involved in other
speculations, some of them, like his investments in
the copper mines, indirectly connected with engines.
In I 787 trade was depressed. There had been
considerable over-production in the cotton industry,
and manufacturers had difficulty in disposing of
their stocks. Several big London firms of merchants
were involved, and in I788 there was a crop of
failures, including an old-established Manchester
bank. Boulton badly needed an extension of credit,
but it was extremely hard to get. He appealed to
Watt for assistance. But Watt, with characteristic
caution, had already safely invested his money, and
the appeal was made in vain. When it is remembered
that Boulton had, throughout the hard years of
struggle, taken all the financial risks and worries on
his own shoulders, that he had paid Watt a regular
salary when the business was not making a penny,
and had, out of pure generosity, allowed him half-
profits, instead of the stipulated one-third, when
profits began to come in, Watt's action at this crisis
appears mean and ungrateful. Money matters always
brought out the worst in him. His horror of the
jugglings of finance, his dread of instability of
income, amounted almost to a disease. To withdraw
money from a safe investment and throw it into a
speculative venture seemed to him not merely a pity,
but a crime, a kind of child-murder. It was a crime
that he could not bring himself to commit, even to
help a friend.
Boulton weathered the storm, and his prosperity was
never again in danger, but the strain had
permanently damaged his health. Both the partners
were beginning to look forward to the time when
they would be able to retire from all active share in
the business. Their two sons were being trained to
succeed them, and by I795 they were participating in
the work of management. The partnership and the
patent rights were both due to come to an end in
I800 But before this goal could be reached, there
was one more battle to be fought.
There had always been trouble from pirates Ñmen
who picked up some knowledge of the principle of
Watt's engines and made use of it without
recognising their debt to the inventor. As a rule the
machines they produced were so inefficient that it
was not worth while to stop them. They were either
like Hornblower's engine at Radstroke, which was "
obliged to stand still every ten minutes to snore and
snort," or like Evans's mill, which " was a
gentlemanly mill: it would go when it had nothing to
do, but refused to do any work." Occasionally
excitement was provided by the bursting of a boiler,
but the engines were rarely able to develop enough
energy to achieve this; for in all, as Watt quaintly
expressed it, " the bodily presence was weak."
In time, however, as the machines became more
familiar, and an ever-increasing number of men
passed through the Soho works and went out skilled
engineers, not scrupling to use their skill to defraud
their late masters, piracy became a more serious
matter. Firms ordered engines of Watt's design from
these men, and of course paid Watt no dues on
them. When the engines proved unsatisfactory, they
blamed Watt, and the credit of Soho suffered.
Others, who had Soho engines, refused to pay their
dues, because they saw that their neighbours were
using a similar machine free of charge.
In these circumstances Boulton and Watt decided to
put their rights to the test of law. It was not merely
the loss of revenue that disturbed theme In any case
the patent had only a few years to run. Their pride
was involved. If they submitted without protest, it
would amount to an admission that their business
was built on a fraud, that the invention was a sham,
and that all the payments they had been drawing
from their customers had been exacted on false
pretences. The idea was intolerable. They began to
prosecute the offenders. In I793 action was taken
against a man of the name of Bull, who had been
employed by the firm as a stoker. The case was
perfectly clear, and the jury quickly decided that the
patent had been infringed; they left it, however, to
be determined by a special case in the Court of
Common Pleas whether the patent was in itself good
and valid. This point came up for trial two years later
before the Lord Chief Justice and three judges.
These learned gentlemen had little to say about
steam-engines, but many profound thoughts that
they were burning to deliver on the subject of the
patent laws. Each in turn gave his display of
rhetorical Juggling, spun his argumentary hoops and
jumped through them. Was the subject of the patent
a process or only a principle? And if a process, and a
new process, was it based on an old principle ? Or
was it again a machine, or only part of a machine ?
And if a part, was it merely a new part of an old
machine? So profound was their knowledge of the
law, and so complete their ignorance of the
properties of steam and the history of invention,
that when they came to apply their general
conclusions to the particular case, the nature of the
issue was a matter of pure chance. On they pounded
round the circular track of their arguments, like
racers in a stadium, but there was no common goal
Each one carried his own winning-post in his
pocket, and erected it as soon as he began to feel
tired. It was the judges, rather than the case, that
were in the scales, and blind Justice secured
equilibrium by putting two into each.
This divided opinion on a matter of such
importance was most unsatisfactory, but it was
swept away by the decisive victory in the following
year in the case against Hornblower and Maberly. All
Watt's old friends, with Robison at their head, rallied
to his defence and routed the forces of Jabez, son of
Jonathan. But that was not the end. The case was
tried again on a writ of error, and it was not till I799
that Watt could write triumphantly to Boulton, " We
have WON THE CAUSE hollow. All the Judges
have given their opinions very fully in our favour."
Even after this the engine pirates continued their
operations, but, said Watt, " having become used to
them, we do not lay them so much to heart as
formerly." They caused him a loss of revenue and
heavy expense in legal proceedings, but the honour
of the firm had been vindicated, its prestige was
high, its reputation unchallenged.
When the century drew to its close, Watt was in his
sixty-fourth year. A chapter in his life was ending.
When, thirty-five years before, there had come to
him the first inspired vision of his new steam-
engine, all the labour that followed was but its
necessary sequel. The invention must be perfected,
manufactured, delivered to the public. Until this had
been achieved the process was incomplete. So on he
laboured, finding little joy in the work itself, and
forcing himself to endure much that was almost
intolerable, impelled still by that first desire to create
which would not let him lay aside his tools until the
task was done.
Now at last he had finished. His invention was as
perfect as he could make it, the business was
prosperous, his engines were at work in all the great
industries of the country. Quietly, with no regrets
but only profound satisfaction, he passed from the
scene of his now completed labours, not into
idleness, but to occupy himself with new thoughts
and new projects as fascinating and absorbing as
those of old.
CHAPTER NINE
Last Years
" Wind, sun and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old . . ." RUPERT BROOBE.
WHEN he retired from business, Watt followed the
fashion of the day and invested part of his earnings
in land. The ideal of every successful manufacturer
of that period was to become a country squire, a
member of the landed aristocracy of England. Watt
got to the point of buying an estate in Radnorshire,
but although he paid it occasional visits, he never
migrated to it. He remained true to Heathfield, his
home near Soho, where he had lived since 1789) and
settled down there to pass the remainder of his days
in the old surroundings, among his old friends. He
had no mind to vegetate in obscurity. He valued his
release from the cares that vex a man of business,
because it set him free to live as a man of science.
Many men suffer as they grow old from the
consciousness of the slow, relentless advance of
senility, the sense that physical strength and mental
power, once robust, are cracking and crumbling into
decrepitude. Watt's experience was exactly the
reverse. All his life he had suffered the torments of
ragged nerves and a sickly body, but, as old age
approached, these troubles passed away. His temper
became calm and serene, his health ceased to mar his
pleasure in life, and his mental powers remained as
keen as ever. Lord Brougham, who knew him in his
years of retirement, expressed the opinion that " he
never was more cheerful or enjoyed the pleasures of
society more heartily than during this period."
But even Watt was not entirely free from the
haunting fear that he was losing his grip of things.
He first became seriously alarmed at the age of
thirty-four when he fancied he was beginning to
show traces of the ravages of time. In the early fifties
he was sure of it. " Of all the evils of age," he wrote,
" the loss of the few mental faculties one possessed
in youth is the most grievous." P.S.Ñ" Steam is only
1800 times the bulk of water. Beighton knew
nothing of it." The snappy little postscript exempts
him from his own generalization. At the age of
seventy, or thereabouts, it is said that his doubts
became so insistent that he determined to test his
capacity for learning and remembering. He selected
Anglo-Saxon as a good subject for his purpose, and
was relieved to find that it presented no great
difficulties. His ingenuity and his passion to create
remained with him to the end, and he was actively
engaged in the perfection of a complicated invention
when he died.
This brief narrative, concerned, as it must be, chiefly
with his supreme achievement, has scarcely done
justice to the astonishing fertility of his mind and
variety of his occupations. From his earliest days he
showed an insatiable curiosity in every kind of art or
craft with which he came into contact. He was never
content not to understand. Everything must be
examined. And he brought to the study a keen
power of analysis and a wonderfully retentive
memory. The result was that there was hardly any
technique, even remotely connected with his
profession, of which he was not a master in theory.
When his advice was asked on any practical
problem, he always seemed able at once to explain
the best method yet devised for coping with it, and
would probably go on to produce from the
storehouse of his mind the roughly sketched plans
of an entirely new and superior method of his own.
When he entered into partnership with Boulton, he
found the task of keeping an orderly record of his
business correspondence a very burdensome one.
Any office under Boulton's control could be relied
on to be up-todate in every detail of its equipment;
but that did not satisfy Watt. He invented a " way of
copying writing chemically." It was not a
complicated machine, but he had taken great trouble
to discover the best kind of ink and paper for the
purpose, and to design the press, and he was proud
of it. He took out a patent in 1780 and then hawked
the machine round to business men, bankers and
Members of Parliament. The bankers at first
denounced it as a means to make forgery easy, but
their fears were set at rest, and it had an extensive
sale. For several years, while the engine was still
unable to earn him a penny, the copying machine
brought Watt in a steady and most welcome income.
A few years later we find him annoyed by " the
abominable smoke which attends fire engines," and
in particular by the furnace under the big boiler at
Soho " that used to poison Mr. B's garden so much."
Here was another problem on which to exercise his
ingenuity, and in a couple of months he is writing to
a friend, " I have accomplished the engine-fire
without smoke, and I hope soon to show you it in
practice." This, too, was patented. In the very same
letter this indefatigable inventor goes on, " I have
been turning some of my idle thoughts lately upon
an arithmetical machine . . . (it was to multiply and
divide figures of any magnitude) . . . I intend to
make an attempt to make it; I say an attempt, for
though the machine is exceedingly simple, yet I have
learnt by experience that in mechanics many things
fall out between the cup and the mouth." This
particular thing " fell out "; it was never created. On
another occ sion he was shown some lamps, devised
by a man named Keir, with some kind of apparatus
for keeping the wick constantly supplied with oil.
They did not win his admiration. " I am sure they are
clumsy, logger-headed things, topheavy, and liable to
be overset " (he was a merciless critic of the
inventions of others). But they did stimulate his
imagination. " I have four plans for making lamps
with the reservoir below, and the stem as tall as you
please." They were the most amazing lamps ever
seen, fitted with clock work, forcing-pumps " about
the size of a quill," pistons, springs and, finally, as a
crowning folly, a miniature propeller poised over the
chimney and spun by the rising heated air, which
worked an endless screw, which worked a crank,
which worked a piston, which acted in a pump. But
we must forgive him, for at that time he was piston-
mad and engine-haunted.
This by no means exhausts the list. It includes a
linen-drying machine, an artificial alabaster, a
waterproofing process, a specificgravity measure and
an " apparatus for extracting, washing and collecting
of poisonous and medicinal airs." His last invention
was a machine for copying sculpture. He had seen,
during his visit to France, immediately after his
withdrawal from business, an ingenious device for
reproducing medals and works in bas-relief. As
usually happened in his later years whenever he saw
a machine that he had not invented himself, it
appeared to him to be imperfect, a rough sketch that
was only waiting for his genius to turn it into a work
of art. He proposed to increase its accuracy and
enlarge its scope. As soon as he got home he started
his experiments, following the lines of his own
machine for drawing in perspective. The apparatus
was to be designed in such a way that when a blunt
point was passed over the surfaces of the model, a
drill cut identical surfaces in the block of material to
be carved, altering the scale as desired.
It was an ideal hobby for his old age. Without
occupation he would have been restless and
miserable. He had hit on one that absorbed all his
faculties and overtaxed none of them. The work was
neither too heavy nor too delicate for his tired
muscles. It brought no worries in the form of
incompetent or unmanageable workmen, or ill-
executed orders. He was his own workman and his
own contractor. It involved no financial
complications, and there was no one standing at his
elbow urging him to hurry up and put his invention
on the market. And yet it was not just an old man's
harmless toy, which his friends, to humour him,
pretended to admire; it was an elegant and ingenious
piece of mechanism that fascinated every artist or
engineer who visited it.
He had converted an attic over the kitchen at
Heathfield into a workshop, and there he spent
many happy hours absorbed in his mechanical
experiments, surrounded by a delicious profusion of
tools, screws, punches, compasses, scales, crucibles,
gallipots, and, to make him independent of the
household timetable, cooking utensils. In his garret
he was master, and no one dared disturb him or
question what he did, not even his wife. This was far
from being the case in the rest of the house. The
second Mrs. Watt was a tyrant with a relentless
passion for order and regularity. She taught her pugs
never to cross the hall without wiping their feet on
the mat. She made a window through which she
could spy on the servants in the kitchen. She
confiscated her husband's snuff-box if she caught
him taking a pinch, and she sternly rebuked him
whenever he appeared with dirty hands or wearing
his workman's apron. After she had retired to rest,
the old servant, by her orders, entered the room
where Watt was sitting, and, even if he had a guest
with him, firmly and without apology or argument
raked out the fire and removed the lights. " We must
go," said Watt, and meekly led his friend up to bed
in the dark. But the garret was outside Mrs. Watt's
jurisdiction, and there the old man found at last the
peace and leisure that he had longed for all his life.
Under these conditions he made good progress with
his invention. In 1807 he was already getting models
from London to copy, " small busts of Socrates and
Aristotle, and a sleeping boy, sent by Turnerelli, the
sculptor." He was working in alabaster, wood and
ivory, and by 1812 he seemed to be very satisfied
with the results. There was " a little figure of a boy
lying down, and holding one arm, very successfully
done; and another boy, about six inches high, naked,
and holding out both his hands, his legs also being
separate." But he had ambitions to work in marble.
So on he went, making a little change here, trying a
new experiment there, exactly as he had done with
his first steam-engine, and in 18I4 he could report
success. But even then he was not satisfied. His
eightieth year found him still passing his days at
work in his attic, and the last drawings he made of
parts of the machine are dated April 1818 just
sixteen months before his death.
His chief cause of sorrow in these years was the
disappearance, one by one, of his old friends. Watt,
sickly in childhood, nervous and painridden in
middle life, outlived them all. Small had died long
before, in 1775. The death of Roebuck in 1794 did
not affect him deeply, as their friendship had never
been very close. One day in December 1799 Dr.
Black's servant came in and found his master sitting
in his chair, with his plate on his knees, apparently
asleep over his dinner. He crept quietly away and left
him. Some time later he returned. The attitude was
unchanged. He touched the hand that held the plate;
it was cold. Black had long been ill, and his death
was expected by his friends and wished for by
himself, but for Watt it snapped a link with those
early days of struggle and enthusiasm at Glasgow.
The principal friends of Watt's middle life are to be
found among the members of the Lunar Society of
Birmingham. Something has already been said of the
spirit of inquiry and exploration that invaded
intellectual circles in England in the last quarter of
the eighteenth century. Philosophical Societies
became as fashionable as Political Societies, and as
indefatigable in the search for truth. It was an age of
clubs and coteries. In these days, before the railways
had sapped the vigour of the " Provinces " by
drawing all talent to London, philosophers of the
first rank found their friends and their colleagues
among their neighbours, and the quality of the
discussions of a local club might be as high as that
found in the Royal Society itself. The Lunar Society
was the creation of Boulton and Small, and it
contained some of the most brilliant figures of the
day. When Watt came to Birmingham he was eagerly
welcomed as a valuable recruit, and before long he
was on terms of close friendship with several of the
members. The " Lunatics " met, when possible, once
a month, choosing the time when the moon, being
at the full, would light them on their way as they
rode home at night. They discussed all the mysteries
of nature and probed the secrets of earth, air and
water. They certainly did not suffer from timidity. "
If you are meek and humble," wrote Watt to
Erasmus Darwin, " perhaps you may be told what
light is made of, and also how to make it, and the
theory proved both by synthesis and analysis." To
which Dr. Darwin replied, that the " devil has played
me a slippery trick, and, I fear, prevented me from
coming to join the holy men at your house, by
sending the measles with peripneumony amongst
nine beautiful children of Lord Paget's.... As to
material philosophy, I can tell you some secrets in
return for yours; namely, that atmospheric air is
composed of light, and the earth of water (and
aqueous earth). That water is composed of aqueous
gas, which is displaced from its earth by oil of
vitriol."
Dr. Darwin, who was the grandfather of the famous
naturalist, was the hub of this social wheel. He had a
practice at Lichfield, and afterwards at Derby, and a
reputation that extended throughout the Midlands
and reached to London. He was a big, vigorous,
rough, genial and despotic man, with an adventurous
mind and a heart overflowing with kindness. He had
many of the qualities that endeared Dr. Johnson to
his contemporaries, but when the two met they
found that there was no single subject on which they
did not violently disagree, and they parted excellent
enemies. Darwin was keenly interested in Watt's
experiments, having himself indulged in speculation
on the subject of locomotives, and his enthusiasm
led him to give a place to the steam-engine in that "
Economy of Vegetation " presented to the world
under the title of " The Botanic Garden," in which
he celebrated the achievements of science in rhymed
couplets. The rhapsody ends with a prophetic vision
that does credit to his imagination, if not to his
poetic gifts:
" Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER D STEAM !
afar Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car; Or
on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying-
chariot through the fields of air. Fair crews
triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their
fluttering kerchiefs as they move; Or warrior-bands
alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath
the shadowy cloud."
Priestley was a brilliant and original chemist, an
enthusiastic religious controversialist, and a
champion of political liberty. He had moved from
London to Birmingham in 1780 and he regarded this
as " the happiest event in my life," because it
brought him in touch with the group of scientists
and philosophers who clustered round Boulton and
Darwin, and of whom Watt was in his eyes the
greatest. He left Birmingham hastily in 179I. In that
year a mob attacked some friends of the French
Revolution who held a dinner to celebrate the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Priestley had
not been present, but he was generally regarded as
the spokesman of rebels, and his house was sacked
by the rioters. Three years later he left the country to
pass the remainder of his life in exile in America,
and the Lunar Society lost the most stimulating of its
members. After this the group dwindled rapidly, and
the vacant places were not filled by new recruits.
For Watt the first ten years of the new century
brought the heaviest losses. In 1802 Darwin died,
and Watt began to feel himself " as it were in danger
of being left alone in the world." " He was almost
my most ancient acquaintance and friend in
England," he wrote, " I having been intimate with
him for thirtyfour years.... It will be my pride, while I
live, that I have enjoyed the friendship of such a
man." Two years later he lost his younger son,
Gregory; " a splendid striplingÑliterally the most
beautiful youth I ever saw," said his friend Campbell,
the poet. After a short and dazzling career, in which
he showed something of his father's genius
combined with abundant vitality and a gift for
selfexpression, he developed consumption and
slowly faded away. " I cannot weep," wrote Watt, "
but I must ever lament his early fate." " He was a
noble fellow, and would have been a great man. Oh !
there was no reason for his dyingÑ he ought not to
have died," exclaimed his devoted friend, Humphry
Davy, in a letter of bitter, passionate sorrow. A few
months later Watt lost the last remaining friend of
his youth, John Robison, and in 1809 the ally of his
years of manhood, Matthew Boulton.
Yet he was not lonely. He did not rebel against the
decrees of time. He accepted old age, and he found
that it had its consolations. He was compensated for
the lost intimacy of his contemporaries by his
enjoyment of the admiration and respect paid him
by his successors in the field. He was the Grand Old
Man of British science, a revered master to those
about him, to others an almost legendary figure,
supreme among those giants of the past who had
forged the modern world. He loved to sit and talk to
a circle of enthusiastic young scientists, and to feel
that they still came to him as to a great authority,
hung on his lips and wondered at his amazing
erudition. He never lectured them on topics of his
own choice. He let them guide the discussion on to
the subjects that interested them most, and " allowed
his mind, like a great cyclopa dia. to be opened at
any letter his associates chose to turn up." He could
talk to the learned about their science, to the student
about his problems, to the child about its toys, and
fascinate them all alike. Walter Scott met him at a
distinguished party at Edinburgh in 18I4 and was
much impressed. " The alert, kind, benevolent old
man had his attention alive to every ones question,
his information at every one's command. His talents
and fancy overflowed on every subject. One
gentleman was a deep philologist; he talked with him
on the origin of the alphabet as if he had been
coeval with Cadmus; another, a celebrated
criticÑyou would have said the old man had studied
political economy and belles-lettres all his life; of
science it is unnecessary to speakÑit was his own
distinguished walk."
Naturally Watt was often consulted on engineering
problems, and young inventors laid their ideas
before him for his criticism. An engineer submitted
designs for rotative motions. Watt thanked him, but
remarked that none of them were " new to me, or
useful in their present form." One " is not
practicable as you have drawn it.... A more perfect
application of that principle is contained in the
specification of my patent in the year 1781" I do not
by what I have said mean to discourage you from
paying particular attention to the subject; your ideas
are ingenious, and by further experience you may
think upon better things." What could the poor man
do after that ! Even more withering was his reply to
Earl Stanhope, who had taken out a patent for
steamships. " His Lordship has also applied to us for
engines," wrote Watt, " but we believe we are not
likely to agree with him, as he lays too much stress
upon his own ingenuity."
There was, in fact, a trace of intellectual arrogance in
Watt's character, which increased with time. He
believed, and probably with truth, that he was at
least the equal of any engineer alive. He had stood
alone in his youth; he would admit no rivals in his
old age. But he had never shown a petty anxiety
about his reputation; he had never been secretive
about his ideas for fear that others might make
capital out of them. Robison said of him that " he
was without the smallest wish to appropriate
knowledge to himself; and one of his greatest
delights was to set others on the same road to
knowledge with himself. No man could be more
distant from the jealous concealment of a
tradesman." When he was shown the work of
others, he was merciless, but not unfair in his
criticism. If it was good he did not disparage it; he
merely remarked quietly that he had had the same
idea himself many years before, but had never
worked it out in detail. Often this was perfectly true.
Science is logical, and each new thought grows out
of its predecessors. But Watt knew better than most
that the man who " works it out in detail " is the true
inventor.
It is in his attitude towards the problem of steam
locomotion that he is most open to criticism. Watt
believed that where he had toiled and succeeded,
there was no room for improvement at the hands of
others. His engine must not be tampered with. Still
more obvious did it appear to him that where he had
tried and failed, there was little chance that others
would succeed. And he had studied the question of
locomotive engines and deliberately laid it aside as
incapable of satisfactory solution. That others
should be so bold as to tackle it afresh, was an insult
to his judgment.
To many of Watt's friends locomotion was the most
exciting of the possibilities of steampower, and they
constantly urged him to study it. This had been the
substance of Robison's suggestion which first drew
Watt's attention to the subject of engines. Dr. Small
cunningly incited him by reporting the supposed
successes of his rivals. "A linen-draper at London,
one Moore, has taken out a patent for moving
wheel-carriages by steam," he wrote in 1769. "This
comes of thy delays." To which Watt replied, " If
linendraper Moore does not use my engine to drive
chaises, he can't drive them by steam. If he does, I
will stop them. I suppose by the rapidity of his
progress and puffing, he is too volatile to be
dangerous. Let me know all you know of him.'
Anxious curiosity peeps through the arrogant
contempt of his language. But Moore was a quack
and Watt's anxiety subsided. Small had to administer
a few more pinpricks. In 1770 he wrote that he and
Boulton were very anxious to devise an engine to
drive canal boats, and an interesting correspondence
followed on Watt suggesting the use of a screw in
place of the usual paddle-wheels.
In his patent of 1784 Watt included the specification
of an engine to drive a wheelcarriage, but it was little
more than a preliminary sketch. In two long letters
to Boulton he carefully criticised his own invention,
and came to the conclusion that, unless things
turned out better than he expected, " the machine
will be clumsy and defective, and that it will cost
much time to bring it to any tolerable degree of
perfection; and that for me to interrupt the career of
our business to bestow my attention on it would be
imprudent. I even grudge the time I have taken to
write these comments on it." Now to take out a
patent that may block the path of other inventors
when you have no intention of pursuing the subject
yourself is a very questionable proceeding. And in
this case the rival he feared was his own foreman
and loyal friend, William Murdock, who was already
pressing Boulton and Watt to take him into
partnership for the manufacture of locomotives of
his own design. The proposal was rejected, and two
years later, hearing that Murdock wished to apply for
a patent on his own, Watt wrote angrily to Boulton,
asking him to make him give up his experiments. " I
am extremely sorry that W. M. still busies himself
with the steam-carriage. In one of my specifications
I have secured it as well as words could do it,
according to my ideas of it; . . . I have still the same
opinion concerning it that I had; but to prevent as
much as possible more fruitless argument about it, I
have one of some size under hand, and am resolved
to try if God will work a miracle in favour of these
carriages." There is more in the same strain. What he
says in effect is this: " I have reserved the field to
myself and will allow no trespassers. I shall probably
make some experiments, but I regard them as pure
waste of time, and have practically no hopes of
success." He was reluctant to embark on new
problems of such complexity, but he was even more
reluctant to allow any one else the chance of
anticipating him. The policy was not a creditable
one, and it failed. Before he died, the locomotive
was well advanced along the road to success, but he
had had no hand in its creation.
Watt's attitude towards steam navigation was similar,
but the issue was somewhat different. In 1785 two
Scotchmen, Patrick Miller and James Taylor, sat
down to consider whether any power, other than
man-power, could be used to drive paddle-wheels
attached to ships. After much hesitation they voted
for the steam-engine, and invited William Symington
to make them one. The experiment was on the
whole a success, and, anxious to enlarge the scope of
their operations, they made advances to Boulton and
Watt with a view to co-operation. Watt's attitude was
haughty and frigid. He said that he regarded
Symington's engines as an infringement of his
patent, " but as we thought them so defective in
mechanical contrivance as not to be likely to do us
immediate injury, we thought it best to leave them to
be judged by Dame Nature first, before we brought
them into an earthly court." But he was unjust, for it
was Symington who built the Charlotte Degas, the
first steam boat to do practical service on this side of
the l Atlantic. And yet, in a sense he was right For
Symington's work was imperfect, and when Fulton
built the Clermont in 18077 the next land mark in
the history of steam navigation, he equipped it with
an engine ordered from the Soho works, and from
that time onwards shipbuilders figured ever more
prominently among their customers.
Watt was perfectly right not to allow himself to be
distracted from his main work until he had brought
it to perfection. Locomotion presented special
problems of great difficulty. He thought that any
engine would be thrown out of action by the motion
of a boat in rough water. He was convinced that for
land transport a compact engine driven by high-
pressure steam was essential, and he doubted the
ability of the mechanics to make anything strong
enough. These difficulties were genuine, but they
proved not to be insurmountable. By the time work
at Soho was running smoothly, he was too tired of
business and all its worries to launch out into a new
enterprise. He would have had to face once again
the same old troublesÑtrials wrecked by faulty
workmanship, profits swallowed up in expenses,
patent rights invaded by piratesÑand he had no
mind to do it. He was a scientist by choice, and a
manufacturer only by necessity, and in his old age he
preferred to follow his inclinations. But he was
wrong to discourage the experiments of others and
to belittle their work. It is not surprising that he
lacked the vision to see the great future that was in
store for steam locomotion, but it is a pity that he
allowed his action even for a moment to suggest
comparisons with the dog in the manger.
But Watt's faults and failures were few as compared
with his virtues and successes, and so it appeared to
his contemporaries. His fame spread quickly among
scientists and philosophers in all countries. He was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1785. The
University of Glasgow honoured him with the
degree of LL.D. in 1806. Two years later the
Institute of France made him a corresponding
member, and in 1814 paid him the very high tribute
of choosing him as one of the eight Associes
Etrangers of the Academie des Sciences. English
society gradually awoke to the fact that it had been
harbouring a man of genius, and the news
penetrated finally even to the Government. He was
offered a baronetcy, which he politely declined.
In the world of industry the fame of the Soho
engines was widespread and unchallenged at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. But if we were
to measure the extent of the use of steampower in
the British Isles at the date of Watt's death by the
output of Soho, our conclusions would be very wide
of the mark indeed. Even before the patent expired
in 1800, engines were being produced outside
Boulton's factory. There were the makers of
Newcomen engines, there were others who, like
Watt himself, had introduced their own
improvements into the Newcomen model, and there
were the pirates who exploited Watt's ideas without
paying for them. After that date the field was thrown
open and new manufacturers quickly appeared.
More than this, Watt's model became in its turn an
object for improvement by the ingenuity of other
inventors, so that buyers could no longer feel certain
that they would obtain the most upto-date pattern
from Soho. Watt would have liked to believe that
the Spirit of Mechanical Creation, working through
his genius, made an engine, and saw that it was
good, and rested. But it was not so.
Yet this does but increase the tribute that is due to
Watt, by multiplying the value of his gift to the
world. Fot it remains true that the gift was his, and
he was not guilty of idle boasting when he wrote,
three years before his death: " I have spent a long
life in improving the arts and manufactures of the
nation; my inventions at present, or lately, giving
employment to the best part of a million of people,
and having added many millions to the national
riches, and therefore I have a natural right to rest in
my extreme age."
The industrial importance of the invention is too
obvious to require much comment. The new power
spread rapidly through the mines, the metal industry,
the waterworks, the cornmills, paper-mills and silk-
mills, the breweries and dis tilleries. By 1820 it had
captured the cotton industry, and it was clear that,
before long, it would capture the woollen and
worsted industries as well. The whole basis of our
economic prosperity was changed. Production
requires energy, and energy must be " fed." The first
essential for production is the " food " of energy. To
possess it in abundance gives security, to possess it
in superabundance gives power, for it is a universal
need. The " food " of energy produced by steam was
coal, and in coal England had at that time an
undoubted preeminence. The resulting superiority in
production gave her a bargaining power in the
markets of the world, which enabled her to view
with equanimity the prospect of becoming
dependent on foreign purchase for her food supply.
In the eighteenth century no country felt safe unless
it could produce enough food to satisfy the needs of
its population. A nation's capacity for greatness was
limited by its productivity in corn. And this was
unfortunate for England, for by 1800 the limit
appeared to have been reached, and there was no
room for expansion. As Malthus pointed out, it was
not easy even to stand still, since the growth of
population tended to drag down the level of
prosperity. The transformation of industry by the
introduction of steam-power gave England a new
lease of life. Her capacity for greatness seemed now
to be limited only by her productivity in coal, and in
consequence the road to economic prosperity was
almost too fatally easy for the Victorians. Watt and
his successors in the field of transport had laid the
Malthusian bogey and created the specialised
industrial State.
The social effects were equally striking, and almost
entirely beneficial. The steam-engine certainly
hastened the growth of capitalism, but it did not
create " wage slavery." Unscrupulous employers
were exploiting the labour of their workpeople in
cottages, workshops and watermills before a single
steam factory had been built. And they had more
scope for it. Waterpower is intermittent. In a hard
winter or a dry summer it might fail, the mills
stopped work, and men, women, and children were
reduced to destitution. To balance this risk the
owner of a mill would, when water was plentiful, run
his machinery continuously until the mill hands
dropped from fatigue, rather than let it stand idle
while his precious source of power flowed uselessly
away. Steam is more reliable, and coal does not
degenerate from disuse, therefore in the factories
there was some hope of regulating the hours of
work.
In a cotton-mill planted on some stream in the heart
of the country the employees, largely children, were
dependent on their employer not only for their
conditions of work, but also for their conditions of
life. They formed a little isolated colony of which he
was autocrat. Often the buildings had not been
designed as workshops. They were converted barns
and cartsheds, dirty, dangerous and unventilated.
The steam-engine brought the factories into the
towns, where the employees had some degree of
independence; it drew the wage-earners out of
obscurity into the factories where pressure of public
opinion and legislation could force the standard of
the most backward up to the level of the most
enlightened. For the engine and the heavy machinery
that it drove, special accommodation was required,
and new buildings were erected for the purpose
which offered far healthier conditions of work than
anything that had preceded them. The steamengine
diminished the risk of accident in the mines and the
suffering and loss of life at sea. It is true that new
problems appeared, but they were solved; and,
taking the general rate of social progress as our
standard, we must admit that they were quickly
solved. When the depression that followed the great
wars passed away, it was not in the factories that the
worst distress was found, but among the workers
outside them.
On August 19th, 1819, Watt passed peacefully away
at Heathfield, and was buried in Handsworth
Church. The honour that had been paid to him
during his life continued to be paid to his memory
after his death. In 1824, as a result of a public
meeting in London, a statue of him wasexecuted by
Chantrey and placed in Westminster Abbey. In 1882
his name was given a permanent place in the
vocabulary of science at the suggestion of C. W.
Siemens, who, in his Presidential Address to the
British Association, made the following proposal: "
The other unit I would suggest adding to the list is
that of power... It might be appropriately called a
Watt, in honour of that master mind in mechanical
science, James Watt." When the hundredth
anniversary of his death came round in 1919, the
Science Museum in South Kensington celebrated it
by holding a Centenary Exhibition. For this purpose
the Watt Collection which the Museum possesses
was supplemented by extensive loans of models,
drawings and letters. The permanent collection has
recently been enriched, and in particular by the gift
of the contents of the famous Heathfield garret, and
the curious will now be able to see an exact
reproduction of the retreat in which Watt spent the
last peaceful years of his long life of service to
science and to humanity.
Appendix
THE WATER CONTROVERSY
FOR centuries scientists believed that water was an
element and indivisible. Three men, Cavendish, Watt
and Lavoisier, have claimed the credit for the
important discovery that it is a compound of oxygen
and hydrogen. For about seventy years a controversy
raged over the merits of their respective claims. The
result may be briefly summarised.
It is necessary first to understand the terms then in
use. All gases were referred to as air. But the
properties of air varied. There was supposed to be
an invisible substance, called phlogiston, the
principle of fire, which was contained in all
inflammable bodies and was given off when they
burned. Air deprived of its phlogiston, "
dephlogisticated air," was what we know as oxygen.
" Inflammable air " covered all gases that will burn,
including hydrogen. The latter was sometimes
distinguished as " the inflammable air from metals."
In I776 two chemists, Warltire and Macquer,
independently observed that when inflammable air is
burnt in ordinary air, water is deposited. Priestley
repeated the experiment, but no use was made of the
observation. Cavendish heard of it, realised its
importance and, in the summer of I78I, conducted a
series of experiments in which he produced water by
exploding a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen in a
closed vessel. He reported these experiments to
Priestley, who tried to repeat them, and in turn
reported his efforts to Watt.
Watt jumped to the conclusion that water is a
compound, consisting of dephlogisticated air and
inflammable air, or phlogiston, and expressed this
theory in a letter written to Priestley on April List,
I783, which he asked him to send to the Royal
Society together with the account of his (Priestley's)
experiments. Watt's letter was not made public,
because Priestley threw doubt on the theory, and
Watt asked that it might be held back until he had
made further investigations. But several scientists,
including Cavendish, saw it. Meanwhile Cavendish
concluded his experiments and, on January 15th,
I784, read a paper to the Royal Society in which he
put forward a similar theory of the composition of
water, using the same terms and making no mention
of Watt.
Watt's guess that water is a compound was certainly
original, and it was a brilliant piece of intuition. But
it was based on the experiments of Cavendish,
reported to him via Priestley. His view of the nature
of the ingredients was false, for by " inflammable air,
or phlogiston " he meant, not hydrogen, but any
inflammable gas. Cavendish, on the other hand, was,
in a sense, right. For though he spoke vaguely of "
phlogiston," he had in his experiments always used
hydrogen and knew that no other gas would serve. It
remained for Lavoisier to complete the discovery by
showing that phlogiston was a myth, and that
hydrogen is a perfectly definite and distinct gas.
Watt thought that it was his letter that suggested to
Cavendish the idea that water is a compound. The
fact that Priestley was surprised when he heard
Watt's theory might be taken to indicate that he had
had no hint of anything similar from Cavendish,
with whom he was in close touch. But Priestley
often misunderstood what Cavendish was doing,
and blundered badly when he tried to imitate him, so
his evidence is unreliable. It is incredible that a man
of Cavendish's character should have repudiated so
great an obligation to a man whom he honoured as a
scientist and valued as a friend. We may assume,
therefore, that he understood the meaning of his
own experiments without the help of Watt.